


Pear-Shaped

by headbuttingbears



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Poe Dameron (Comics)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Aliens Made Them Do It, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst, Aphrodisiacs, Attempt at Humor, Character turned into a child, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Consensual Touching, One Shot Collection, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 01:57:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14178063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/headbuttingbears/pseuds/headbuttingbears
Summary: "Alright, what have you done now," Leia said. | Two times things didn't go according to plan, and one time Poe Dameron forgot what the hell aplaneven was.





	1. The one where BB-8 is turned into a kid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gen. Set during SW: Poe Dameron. On the trail of a valuable technology, Poe and BB-8 end up in perilous circumstances that have consequences neither of them ever prepared for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically speaking, BB-8 does die. But it gets better!!
> 
> Includes a flashback that references an idea I saw on Tumblr. I like it, I took it, sue me.

It was crowded in the dormitory, the panicked yells of the Astali echoing off the close walls, the high ceiling. They were packed in at the back of the room, still piling up the cots and tables and anything they could carry while thirty metres away Poe, BB-8, and the Astali matron reexamined the device.

Poe could barely hear himself think for the noise, not that what he was thinking was all that useful at the moment. A lot of _oh shit_ and _you should be getting as far away from the bomb as possible_ which… duh. But also not helpful.

The device—the _bomb_ —was a small thing but full of too many wires, too many capsules, and the lights of the countdown device were spinning faster and faster-

Poe wiped the sweat from his brow and glanced up, saw his fear mirrored in the matron's shining teal eyes. Neither of them were trained for this, but they were all these people had, and Poe had never been one to sit idly by.

He clenched his jaw and sat back on his heels. "If _that's_ the power unit," he said again, wishing for what felt like the hundredth time that half the device weren't encapsulated in lead and impervious to BB-8's scans. "And _that's_ the- Oh, shit."

The lights had stopped spinning in favour of pulsing steadily, growing brighter, and Poe scrambled up to his feet, grabbed the matron. "Go, get back! C'mon, BB-8, we have to move _now_." There wouldn't be enough distance, but anything would be better than being right in front of the blast.

Nearly at the makeshift barricade, Poe looked back when he didn't hear BB-8 rolling along. "BB? BB-8!"

The droid hadn't followed. It had gone in the opposite direction instead, towards the doors, only to stop when it was three-quarters of the way down the hall. It let out a piercing series of beeps.

 _Don't worry, I've got this?_ Poe frowned, shout dying in his throat as he watched BB shoot out one of its grappling hooks. His breath caught as it caught perfectly in the device, and BB reeled it in swiftly, like a fisherman with a promising bite. Towards itself, quickly. Away from the people.

"BB!" Claws grabbed at him, pulled him back when he started forward.

"No, Commander!" The matron's talons dug deep into his sleeve. "You mustn't! It's only a droid."

"Let me go!" Poe struggled blindly with the hands clutching at him. Too busy watching as BB released the bomb, then sped to the locked doors, as far from the crowd as possible. And again, the line shot out—because BB couldn't roll _and_ drag the bomb, Poe thought emotionlessly. Glowing bright as a dwarf star, the bomb practically flew towards BB. Poe imagined he could hear the _thunk_ as it struck the stone door when BB rolled out of the way. Reeled it in too fast.

Sometimes BB got too excited to be precise, but it had been getting better, he thought wildly, flightsuit material tearing when he wrenched away to charge forward, because the light was blinding now and BB was speeding towards him at top speed, anxious whistle piercing, carrying over the shrieks as the light grew and grew and-

 

Poe groaned, rolled to his side woozily. The constant pulsing tone in his ears was making him nauseous. "Take it down a notch, alright, buddy?" he muttered, covering the ear not pressed to the floor with his hand.

The tone died down to a ringing. Bearable, at least.

"That's better, thanks."

How- He was on the floor. Alright. Not the first time. Could he get up? He would get up. Poe pressed his tacky palms to the fluff-strewn floor and pushed himself upright to his knees. Slow and steady, though shaking his head to clear the ringing was a mistake. He would've fallen over again if someone hadn't bolstered him from behind.

"Thanks, pal," he said, looking over his shoulder. Squinting through the drifting clouds of smoke, and so sure it would be BB-8, but it wasn't. It was one of the Astali, a younger female judging by the pale yellow fur around her eyes. Not who he was expecting to see.

"Slowly, slowly," she said, more insistently when he ignored her to stagger quickly up to his feet.

"BB?" he called, peering through the smoke, eerie wisps under the flickering lights. There was noise before him: more Astali. Low crying, some moans, croaking calls that bounced eerily from wall to blast-scorched wall. Sounds of relief or distress, but living, organic and not at all what he was searching for. He turned in the other direction, wishing the smoke would clear so he could get his bearings. But if the people were behind him- The doors. Where BB had been, speeding towards him, away from-

"BB-8?" he shouted, loping fowards through the thinning smoke. It stung everywhere it touched his skin, covered in cuts and scratches from debris as he searched. "Talk to me, buddy, where are you?" The droid had been closer to him than the bomb, and if _he'd_ survived relatively unscathed, surely BB had. The droid had been through worse, one little _explosion_ wasn't going to-

Rubble caught the toe of his boot, tripped him and he nearly went down head-first. Unsteady, ears still ringing, he caught himself with a hand on something hot, a jagged edge cutting his fingers.

"Oh," he breathed, drawing his hand back and leaving a bloody smear on the fractured wreck of BB-8's shell. "Oh, buddy. No."

 

The rule was that no pilot flew solo, no matter how high their colours soared on their final exams. So Poe Dameron tried astromech after astromech, and found problems with every one.

Too much attitude; not enough. Too nervous when he performed a maneuver; too critical when he didn't. Too big, too little, ugly colour scheme. Too old, too new—never trust an initial release. But, overwhelmingly, too slow. They couldn't keep up, they second-guessed his calculations. They lagged behind.

He sighed heavily and made a second circuit through the depot, dully scanning the specs for the latest models Jibrael had released. None of them looked promising. He wondered if he could get his hands on an old garbage receptacle, if the Republican Navy could possibly be fooled with a paint job and some flashing lights-

A friendly chirp issued from behind him, interrupting his thoughts.

"Hm? Oh, no, thanks, just… browsing," he said to the BB unit.

The droid rocked back and forth in a charming display of curiousity as it whistled and beeped a series of sales questions.

Poe smiled in bemusement as he answered the droid, looking around the depot for any other attendants. He couldn't remember the last time anyone—or anything—had approached him. Not after the fifth time he'd returned a droid, anyway. They'd given up on him, frustrated when he'd pointed out that the Navy was covering all the costs in the first place, so what was the problem?

"Are you new?" he asked the droid in lieu of expressing interest in any of the astromech models it suggested.

The droid rolled back, dome tilting as it whistled nervily at him.

"Oh, so they _warned_ you about me," he laughed. "Yet here you are."

A little wiggle of determination, a sliding scale of beeps that made him grin sincerely.

"I like a challenge too," he said, before his grin faded as he looked at the walls of droids and flashing holoads. All of them were so unsuitable. "Ordinarily."

Beeps and blips of solidarity, and the droid bumped lightly against his leg.

"Yeah?" It had been a while since a droid had suggested working together on anything. Poe knelt down to better look at the droid. Small, much smaller than any of the R-units, and with a more streamlined shape. The colours were simple, not too garish, but that orange was sharp. Almost like his flight suit… "What model are you? A seven?"

The droid shifted, seemed to straighten up proudly as it corrected him.

"An _eight_ ," he repeated thoughtfully. "You _are_ new then. Factory fresh." He had a rule about first-runs, namely to wait until all the kinks had been ironed out, but-

 _Would you be interested in a brochure?_ A little drawer popped out of the droid's front, offering a series of flimsi cards. _The BB is a very customizable model!_

Customizable, and far superior to a painted trash can. Poe took a card to satisfy it, smile returning as he tapped it against his knee. "Are you rated for astromech work?"

BB-8's dome slid sideways across its body, as if it was tilting its head in confusion. The drawer slowly retracted as it beeped back an affirmative that while the latest BB models _were_ certified for flight and interstellar travel, they were not programmed for calculating-

The droid quieted immediately when Poe waved its words away. Negatives didn't exist in his vocabulary. Everything had a way around it, or through it, or over it. Often over. _Way_ over. "You want to hang around here all day, hustling for commission, or do you want to see the stars?"

The photoreceptor lens dilated rapidly as a soft whirr escaped the droid before it rolled closer, its beeps low. A little conspirator.

"You don't make commission?" Poe leaned back in feigned shock before he got to his feet, slipping the card into his pocket. "That's it, pal, you're coming with me," he said, patting BB-8's dome once before striding off to find someone he could negotiate with, the droid tailing him with an excited chatter of whistles and never once suggesting he try one of the other models in storage.

 

"Commander? Are you injured?"

Poe shook his head, not bothering to wipe away the tears or look up at the matron standing a foot or so away. He was busy.

BB's damage was substantial, there was no getting around that. The blast had caught it from behind, blackened its exterior casing where debris and sheer concussive force hadn't torn through it. Poe barely noticed how frayed copper wires pricked his fingers as he worked to jumpstart the droid's power unit. If it could turn on, it would be fine. He'd get it patched up, get some shiny new parts—a new shell was a must, and maybe some new peripherals to mollify it after? BB was always reluctant to undergo major service, but Poe didn't have the parts or the know-how to do it himself. Just like he didn't have the tools now-

Pliers. He needed pliers to twist the wires together; he left bloody streaks on the fabric of his flight suit as he patted down various pockets, staggered up to his feet to search for his omnitool. It had to be around here somewhere-

"Get away from BB," he snapped, when a pair of Astali took the opportunity to move closer to the droid, periwinkle blue hands outstretched to touch it. Bristling, he stepped between the women and his friend. "Don't touch-"

"It is damaged," said one of the women, neck fluff ruffling. The same young female who'd helped him up; he recognized her yellow fur. She traded looks with her twin, who nodded, thick golden hairs drawn down between her eyes in a furrow of unhappiness.

"It saved us," she said in turn. "We will return the favour."

"It is a _droid_ ," intoned the matron. Her blank expression didn't change when Poe glared at her, nor did she uncross her furred arms. "It is replaceable, is it not?"

"Not to _me_!" Swallowing thickly, he bit his lip hard when it kept twitching downward. The sight of BB—motionless the way it never normally was, half its interior components hanging out, smooth orange curves puckered by heat where they weren't altogether _gone-_

Dust from the ceiling drifted down, coating BB's dome; Poe pulled his sleeve over his hand to wipe it off. "Sorry, you've got a little…"

BB didn't beep a question, swivel its head trying to see, or wiggle back out of Poe's reach like a child avoiding its mother's spit-wet thumb. BB didn't respond at all.

Poe let his sleeve slip back, hand dropping away as he hiccuped a sob. His knees gave out and he was back on the floor, coolant and oil wetting his pant legs anew.

The twins moved in his periphery, ducking down in an attempt to catch his eye. "We can repair the damage, Commander."

The matron clucked. "It is a-"

A loud hiss startled Poe. His instincts said pressure leak, oxygen venting, but the source was the older twin, the one with the golden marks. The expression she aimed at the matron, like the noise, was one of disgust. "We have a debt. Repayment is necessary. Unless you would rather owe?"

The matron bristled, stared for a moment, before her fur lay flat once more, with a shrug, she walked away.

Ignoring the matron's slow departure, the less aggressive twin who had helped him up turned from her distant consideration of BB-8 to speak softly to Poe. "Do you wish us to repair it?"

He wiped his nose on his sleeve, feeling far younger than he had in years. _It's only a droid_. As if BB were a broken toy and he could just buy a new one. "Please."

She nodded, then gave him a hand up, her black claws curling lightly around his bloody hand as her twin motioned to others for assistance. "Come with us."

 

In hindsight, BB-8 had done what he should've thought of right at the start: moved the bomb to the locked doors and run for cover. He couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to him. Sure, it had been a bit of a frenzy for a hot minute, what with being needled by Terex and herded in at blasterpoint with the shrieking Astali priestesses, left to be blown to smithereens in some low-budget holothriller, but still.

Here, now, three sublevels down from the dormitory, it all seemed so obvious. How had he missed it? Use bomb to blast open doors. Simple. Of course his droid had figured it out, but why hadn't he?

Exhaustion weighed heavily on Poe as he stared past his unsteady reflection in the glass to the room beyond, where the twins worked under flickering lights to carefully arrange BB-8- _What was left of BB-8,_ his mind corrected, and what was left still took two Astali to lift.

If he hadn't choked, things might've- No, _would have_ turned out differently.

He knocked his clenched fist against his thigh as the younger twin, Maaht, re-entered the small dark room he stood in. "You're sure you can fix BB?"

She nodded and headed to a low console, claws clicking against dials and buttons that lit up at a touch. "Yes, we can repair. The droid is not so damaged that it is beyond us. There are enough remains."

 _Remains_. Poe shuddered at the thought, watching as the older twin, Yani, guided a large ring attached to a swinging arm to the far end of the table BB laid on. The ring was alabaster in colour with complex markings around a third of its circumference, and thicker than the length of his fingertips to his elbow. But the hole in the center was wide enough for the table, which was no larger than a single cot, to pass through.

The search for Lor San Tekka had led him to the Astali and the old man's investigation of some wild claim about their ability to resurrect the dead. Rumours were thick that they'd been paid off to revive the Emperor. Completely bogus, Poe decided after a few days among the priestesses, but now… was it really?

"Have you ever failed at repairing something?" Poe asked as Yani rolled a second table over to the ring's other side, mirroring the first table.

"There have been… incidences, yes," Maaht said, choosing her words carefully. "Ashes are not conducive."

Finished with her arrangements, Yani slipped into the room and joined her sister at the console. Too tired to eavesdrop, knowing he should, Poe picked up very little of their conversation. Important words like _contaminants_ and _replicable inorganics_. Things he should've cared about, but instead he leaned his forehead against the cool glass and stared at his droid, letting the whispers and rhythmic clicks wash over him.

"Odrem!" Yani swore, and banged once on the console once, alarming Poe. "Apologies," she said, ducking her head at her sister's disapproval. "The power-"

"Will hold for this," Maaht said calmly. She gave Poe a slow blink, large teal eyes identical to the matron's. "You will want to look away. It is a spectrum that is… uncomfortable. For your species." She tapped a button; Yani turned a dial slowly.

Behind him, there was a vibration, steadily growing in strength.

"Three. Two."

Poe covered his eyes-

"One."

-And discovered that he should've covered his ears instead. The drone was incessant, bone-rattling, and worsened the pain in his head to an unbelievable degree. The pure white light radiating from the room behind him was no fun either, but the constant _vvvvwoRRp-vvvvwoRRp-vvvvwoRRp_ noise made his eyeballs jiggle. Though they were mere feet away, Poe could barely make out the shapes of the twins operating the console. Calmly, at first, but as he squinted at their shimmering outlines, their movements grew more frantic.

The light flickered. Or had he blinked?

One shape grabbed another, pointed.

Another flicker, longer than a blink and nothing he'd imagined. Something was wrong.

 _The power_ , Yani had said. Warned. He remembered the lights back in the dormitory, throughout the rest of the building. How erratic they'd been. Thought it had just been the explosion, but what if Terex and his goons had done something else? Messed with the power supply, sabotaged it somehow after leaving Poe and the Astali to die?

A third flicker, too long to be confused for anything but a power fluctuation, and the _vvvvwoRRp_ sound faltered, shifted into something painfully higher-pitched but vastly more musical. A series of tones, up and down; Poe's eyes prickled with tears at how similar it was to BB's thoughtful whistle. A sweet run of notes as it burbled to itself. Daydreamed. He clenched his eyes shut.

The sound rang in his head for so long he didn't notice it had actually stopped. Not until one of the twins, Maaht, touched his elbow.

"There has been an incident," she said.

 

It—he—looked to be about four or five years old. Poe wasn't good at judging kids' ages, he'd never spent any time around them. He settled on five. A nice round number.

He wasn't much of a yeller but the urge was strong as he gazed down at this… moppet. This was not his droid. This was something else. A little boy. _You said you'd fix BB-8_ , he wanted to shout at them. _This isn't_ fixed _!_

"There were contaminants," Maaht said, scraping her claws against each other as Poe stood next to the table that had previously been empty and was now… occupied. "DNA. Organic matter."

"My blood," Poe said tonelessly. They hadn't cleaned BB off before they performed the procedure. That explained the dark hair, the skin colour. He bet when—if—the kid opened his eyes, they'd be brown. Dark brown, like his.

"Yes," Maaht said. "Normally, we can filter it out, replicate only the inorganic, but there were anomalies."

"Fluctuations." Yani, after pushing the ring back against the wall, came forward with a blanket the colour of a healthy yellow star. Some sort of pelt, Poe thought, opting not to wonder what it was made of when she handed it to him. "In the power supply. We could not adjust in time, and-"

"Can you reverse it? Fix it properly?" It felt cruel of him to ask, standing next to the kid and laying the blanket over his naked, snoozing body, but. This wasn't what he wanted. Or agreed to. Nor what BB-8 had ever consented to.

"We will retain the inorganic composite in our system," Maaht said. "We will correct the error. In time."

He'd had enough experience with bureaucrats to be able to parse that. "You mean not now." The kid's hair was tousled; Poe brushed it back, frowning when the kid stirred in his sleep. "Is he going to wake up?"

"Yes. In time."

He ducked his head, chin to chest, biting his lip to keep from saying anything that could make matters worse. So tempting to, but for once he'd keep his mouth shut. If it had been only his neck on the line he wouldn't have bothered, but BB… The other table was empty. When they said _composite_ they meant _body_. Their machine—scanner, replicator, glorified noisemaker, whatever it was – had absorbed the entire droid. They hadn't left Poe so much as a microchip, a flake of paint. Nothing.

"It will remember," Yani said, as if that was supposed to make him feel better. "It is only the shell that has been altered. The core is the same."

Great.

 

After he cleaned up, the Astali let him use their holoprojector unit to contact the General. Neighbourly of them considering what they'd done with his.

"I suppose that's reassuring," Leia said after he relayed his findings. "The last thing we need is the Knights of Ren running around with a newer, younger Palpatine. How did you find this out? Or should I even ask."

Poe hesitated. While he'd included Terex and the bomb in his report, he'd left out everything to do with BB-8, reasoning that it didn't relate to the mission's objective. Sent to find Tekka, he'd hit another dead end; the rest of it was personal. But now…

"Dameron?" Even as a staticky holo, far smaller than usual, the General had a commanding air, but when he opened his mouth the words wouldn't come. "Poe? What is it?"

What was he going to say? _I know they can bring things back to life because BB-8 died saving me and they turned him into human child?_ "I-"

"Poe?" A very loud, very young voice interrupted him. A long hallway away, he could hear its anxiety growing with every call of his name. "Poe?"

He whirled back to the projector and said, "Sorry, General, I've gotta go. I'll update you as soon as I can."

"Dameron, don't you dare-" Whatever else Leia was about to say was cut off by the transmission ending once he slapped the _end_ button, just in time for Maaht to hurry into the room, scraping her claws together.

"Commander, it is awake."

"Really? I had no idea," he said, retying the torn sleeves of his flight suit around his waist. They both winced at another screech and Maaht led the way down the corridor, unhappy cries of _Where's Poe? What's happening? Poe!_ echoing around them.

The kid shut up the moment Poe appeared in the doorway, hands up and open.

"Hey, hey, it's alright," he said, nodding to Yani and another Astali as he entered the room. "Calm down." He'd been right about the kid's eyes. Too big at the moment – he could see the white all the way around them as the kid sucked in huge panicky breaths. Hopefully not to fuel any more of those ear-piercing shrieks.

"Poe?" It—he—asked in a thankfully quieter voice as he clutched at the hem of his loose green shirt; the matching pants were too long and fell over his feet.

Guilt hit Poe like a hard jab to the stomach. BB had slept all through the Astali dressing him, Poe carrying him up through the honeycomb maze of the complex, and done little more than snore in the time Poe had sat watching him. But in the twenty minutes Poe'd taken to clean up and report to the General, he'd woken up? Figured.

He was sitting up on a cot the Astali salvaged for him, in a private room used for meditation a few twists and turns from the office they'd led Poe to earlier.

"That's me," he said awkwardly, shifting the rumpled blanket from the floor to the cot and taking a knee before him out of habit. "How're you feeling?"

The kid's breathing had slowed, but he still looked distinctly unhappy. "I don't know. I don't know what's going on," he said, looking at his tiny hands where they lay in his lap. Then his head snapped up as he stared intently at Poe. "The bomb! Are you injured?" And then those same tiny hands shot up and grabbed at Poe's face.

"Watch it!" Poe, caught off guard, wobbled as the kid turned his head this way and that by his ears, examining him. He had to steady himself on the cot.

"I can't scan you," the kid said, going slightly cross-eyed as he frowned at the cut on Poe's nose. " You look so different! Are you hurt? Do you require medical assistance?"

"Cuts and bruises, nothing to worry about." Poe gently pried little fingers away from his tender ears. He shouldn't have been surprised: BB-8 had been slightly paranoid about his well-being since Megalox Beta. "I'm fine, pal, really," he said, when the kid – BB – looked unconvinced. "Do you remember what happened?"

"I was damaged," BB said, frown returning but less severe than before. "My systems were offline for… I don't know how long. I can't tell what time it is." His nose crinkled adorably in frustration.

"A while." Poe sighed as the kid's hands pulled free from his loose grip and clung to his sleeves instead. "You were extremely damaged. The Astali tried to repair you, but…" How could he explain something that he barely understood it himself? They hadn't told him anything about the process, how they'd managed to transfer BB-8's consciousness into this body. How they'd _made_ this body in the first place. Sure, it was the Outer Rim, kind of hard to enforce any of the laws prohibiting cloning, but he thought it usually took longer than ten minutes to manufacture a human being, even a small one.

He cleared his throat. "They were missing some parts, so I asked them to transfer you. Just as a temporary thing." A lie, but a well-meaning one. BB didn't need to know all of this— _he_ —had been a mistake.

"So they uploaded my memory banks into a new host?" BB, proving he'd always been the sort who rolled with the punches, looked less upset than before now that he had an explanation. "Ohhhh." _Far_ less upset.

"Uh, yeah," he said, watching with some amusement as the kid got distracted by the material of Poe's shirt, rubbing it between his fingers with increasing speed. "You got it. A loaner."

" _Wow_." If he'd had any lingering doubts that this child was BB, they vanished in the face of all that childlike wonder.

 _Childlike_. Nothing _like_ about it, he _was_ a child now.

Poe pulled out of BB's grasp to ruffle his short wavy hair, so like his own. "Everything'll be back to normal soon, buddy. We'll get this fixed in no time, okay?"

"Okay." The smile that broke across the kid's face didn't quite break his heart, but it came close. "I know you'll come up with something!"

Poe hid a wince by pulling him into a hug. The kid was stiff for a moment, long enough for him to remember that most droids weren't equipped for this. That, as easy with affection as Poe was, he'd never hugged BB before. Not while sober, anyway. But after that moment passed the kid lifted his slender arms and wrapped them tight around Poe's body.

 

"Apologies for earlier, General," he said, snapping her holoprojection a salute. "The transmission wasn't as stable as I thought."

Leia quirked an eyebrow. "We've been having problems on our end as well. Damn solar flares." And then the tranmission winked off.

Drumming his fingers on his knee, Poe watched BB wander around the room, hands trailing across everything in reach. Minus some balance issues, he'd learned to walk with a minimum of difficulty, but seeing him trot along had decided things for Poe. He couldn't afford to stay on the planet indefinitely, waiting for the Astali to fix whatever was broken; the Resistance simply couldn't spare him. The flipside of the equation was that BB had to come with him. No way in hell was he abandoning him. But how to explain it to the General? Any wild schemes he came up with—a long-lost son, a time-displaced self—collapsed the moment he pictured her unimpressed stare.

Better to be honest, at least with her.

So he'd given her the signal for a private chat. He never saluted.

The holounit snapped back on as Poe was wool-gathering; he sat up straight again.

"Alright, what have you done now," Leia said, lips pursed.

"Remember when you asked me how I found out about the Astali's tech?" Poe tried to wave BB over, but the kid was too busy wiggling his fingers and giggling again.

"Yes," Leia said slowly, lines going wavy as she leaned forward on her desk, making the unit shake slightly on her end.

Something about having hands seemed to delight the kid thoroughly, but then Poe imagined it must have been a real thrill to be able to hold things after a lifetime of… not holding them. "And I mentioned how there were some Security Bureau heavies-"

"Yes, I'm not senile, I still remember a conversation from an hour ago." She made an impatient gesture. "Get to the point."

Poe gave up and let out a sharp whistle, catching BB's attention. "This is how I know." When BB was close enough, he wrapped an arm around his narrow shoulders and pull him into the holoprojector's line of sight, sure that Leia would see him.

She blinked, then said flatly, "Adorable. Who is he?"

"General!" BB smiled wider than ever and stood up as tall as he could manage, which wasn't very. Had Poe really been that small? "I'm BB-8, model number-"

Leia ignored the kid as he rattled off his various ID and clearance numbers to stare at Poe with the expected lack of amusement. "Explain. Again. And if you leave anything out this time I'll put your squadron on trash duty and tell them all it was your fault."

BB stopped talking to let out a _hmph_.

 

"A giant cloning ring. Wonderful," Leia said after he was done filling in the blanks, massaging her temples. "And how do you know Agent Terex didn't discover this device while you were busy trying not to die?"

"I don't." Poe shrugged, attention torn between the General and BB, who had managed to sit quietly by his feet for all of five minutes before he got distracted by the waxy walls of the room and crept off to investigate. "But considering he wasn't down there blasting troopers and feeding them through it in some sick attempt at reverse-engineering I'll assume he didn't. He's not really the type to just abandon something so valuable."

"Yet apparently we are," she said, but before he could respond there was a sound like old parchment being torn, followed by a sickly sweet smell.

"Oops," BB said softly, standing behind Poe with his arm halfway into the wall. "Sorry." But his expression was more surprised than apologetic; when he withdrew his hand it was glistening yellow, strands of viscous fluid connecting his fingers together that he was unsuccessful at shaking off. "Ew," he said with a revolted grimace before it faded and he sniffed his hand curiously.

Poe turned back to stare at Leia. "What am I going to tell everyone?"

"Tell them the Force did it," she said flatly. "Tell them he's your long-lost son. Nephew. Whatever. I really don't care, just don't tell them the truth. "

Easy enough providing nobody added two and two together, like how he left with a droid and came back with a kid. "My squad is totally going to-"

"I really don't care," she repeated, amending, "just don't tell anyone but your squad the truth. Knowledge of the Astali technology can't spread; you know how dangerous it could be in the wrong hands."

The sound of lips smacking loudly together came ominously from behind him, and he turned in time to watch, disgusted, as BB licked the goo off his fingers. "It's good!" he said with a big smile before sticking his hand back in the wall.

"He's eating giant sentient bee honey," Poe told Leia with a bone-deep resignation that he worried was going to settle in and become permanent. "Why?"

"Because he's a kid and that's what kids do." For the first time since she'd sent him off to find Tekka, Leia Organa smiled. "Welcome to parenthood. Now feed him properly and get back to base."


	2. The one where Poe becomes a sperm donor to an entire civilization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set during SW: Poe Dameron. The hunt for Lor San Tekka takes Poe and BB-8 to the world of the Kraava-Taali, a matriarchy with a problem only Poe can help solve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made up the Kraava-Taali. If you're familiar with the mythological harpy, you'll get what I was doing with them.

The search for Lor San Tekka had taken Poe to some strange and dangerous places. Emphasis on dangerous. Megalox; that meteor full of giant ship-eating worms; the thing with the egg—all situations that probably could've turned out better, but he was deeply glad hadn't turned out worse.

So when Grakkus the Hutt finally gave up the latest lead on Tekka's whereabouts, Poe felt safe breathing a sigh of relief.

"The Kraava-Taali?" Snap frowned, leaning back on the bench and crossing his arms. "They're still around? I thought they died out after that plague—what was it called—hit them a few years ago."

"No, they're still around," L'ulo said, peering up at the star chart BB-8 was projecting for the squad. "The virus only took the males. They've since relocated and rebuilt."

"A civilization with no men?" Jessika rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Doesn't sound too bad." She shared a laugh with Karé when Snap and Poe both shook their heads.

"I'll tell you how it is when I get back," Poe said, getting to his feet and picking up his helmet.

"You're going _now_?" Snap asked, beating Jessika and L'ulo to the punch. "What about-"

"What about what? Someone's gotta find the old man before the First Order does," Poe said. Helmet braced against his hip, he considered his squad. The last fiasco had been worse than usual, and, though they'd never admit it, they were tired. But with Skywalker still out there, he couldn't afford to rest. Not until he'd completed his mission. "Look, the Kraava-Taali are a fairly reasonable bunch, and their new home isn't too far, according to the map. Just a couple of jumps away."

Projection unit clicking off, BB-8 rolled forward and beeped an affirmative.

"See? Not far at all. You guys deserve a break. I'll be back before you know it," he said, turning on his heel before anyone could further object.

"Keep him out of trouble, BB!" Snap called, a wish echoed by the rest of the squad.

The droid whistled nervily back at him before beeping softly up at Poe as they made their way through the Resistance ship's corridors to the lift up to the launchpad where Black Squadron's fighters were presently located.

"I'm fine, pal, don't worry about it," Poe said, undermining his words with a barely-stifled yawn. "We're just going to run over, knock on a couple of doors, and get some directions. What could go wrong?"

 

A scream tore the air as Poe and BB-8 proceeded towards the Kraava-Taali compound; they stopped to watch as a man sprinted out from a side door and charged towards the teal and turquoise forest they had just emerged from, where a mile in Poe had landed his X-Wing in a discreet clearing.

They watched silently as three Kraava-Taali exited the building after the man. None of them ran, but instead one raised a blaster and fired on him, sending him sprawling face-first into the dirt mere feet from the edge of the underbrush.

"Is he dead?" Poe asked.

BB wobbled back and forth, then emitted a negative beep.

Poe squinted. "Is he naked?"

An affirmative whistle.

"Wow, okay." Poe released his grip on his blaster, but didn't secure his holster as he watched two of the Kraava-Taali meander forward on their enormous clawed feet to grab the unconscious man's ankles with their feathered hands, turn him over, and start dragging him face-up to the building. "That's an encouraging sign," he muttered.

But if he was expecting any similar hostility aimed at himself, he was pleasantly surprised. The Kraava-Taali women at the gate were as somber-faced and polite as he remembered, their round faces and lidless yellow eyes emotionless as ever as he requested a meeting with their leader.

"Leave your weapon with my sister," said the taller of the two, older judging by the darker blues and purer whites of the feathers that covered her head like hair and grew around her neck in a ruff over her long maroon tunic.

The memory of the fleeing man made Poe twitch. "I kinda want to-"

"Leave your weapon with my sister or leave altogether," she repeated, staring at him. "We do not allow men to remain armed while among us."

"Well, when you put it that way…" Poe handed his blaster over to the younger woman and promptly received a flimsi ticket stamped with a number. "Heh. Coat check." His guide had already started down the hall; pocketing the ticket, he jogged to catch up with her, BB speeding along with him. She kept them to a brisk walk that didn't give him much time for sight-seeing. All he got was the impression of soaring ceilings, a lot of splashes of colour, and narrow corridors that were choked with what had to be every Kraava-Taali in the building.

He wasn't shy by nature but he'd never received so much naked attention in his life, with none of it aimed at his face. Their eyes all locked on his flight suit, the bright orange drawing them in like a tractor beam. A very different sort of scrutiny than what he'd received in the space prison he'd been trapped in of late, especially when he considered how many rote apologies he'd received in the last ten minutes after every woman found some reason to bump or brush arms with him.

At last they turned, entering a thankfully empty corridor that sent the echo of their footsteps bouncing back at them. It took seconds for him to realize that BB-8 wasn't behind him; Poe whistled sharply, catching the droid's attention.

It had gotten distracted out in the main hall, dome rotating again and again as it beeped to itself thoughtfully while taking in the numerous wall hangings and tall artfully carved wooden support beams.

"C'mon, buddy, keep up," he called, and the droid let out an apologetic blip and sped forward, sides nearly brushing the walls as it rolled down the tighter corridor.

To his surprise, not only had his guide waited, but she looked down at BB with fondness instead of the thinly-veiled impatience Poe had received earlier. "You like our home, little one?" she asked, and though she didn't smile in response to BB's chirps, her face seemed to brighten nonetheless when he translated BB's appreciation. "The hatchling has good taste," she said to Poe, before turning away with a click of claws on wood.

 _Hatchling?_ BB whistled up at Poe curiously.

He shrugged, remembering what L'ulo had said about rebuilding their society. "Just go with it."

 

Thirty standard minutes later found Poe struggling to take his own advice.

The leader of the Kraava-Taali flock, Eesu, was not much older than his guide and not much taller, but far harder to read. Her response to his explanation of why he'd turned up on their doorstep so suddenly, and who he was looking for, had been… understated, if he was being generous. Eesu's answers were excruciatingly brief: yes, Lor San Tekka was known to her people. Yes, he had visited them at some point in the history of the galaxy. But helpful details, like what and when and _why_ exactly Tekka had been among them, were not forthcoming.

Poe was tempted to ask, "Are you holding back information on purpose just to screw with me or because you don't actually know anything?" The only reason he didn't was because he was afraid he'd get a simple _yes._ He'd have to rip out his hair in frustration if that happened, and he was fond of his hair. It was artfully tousled.

He sipped his cold tea instead, wishing the cushion he knelt on was thicker and reconsidering his plan of attack when there was a knock at the door. BB-8 rolled out of the way in time to avoid being hit when another Kraava woman entered and hurried over to whisper behind a cupped hand into Eesu's ear. Poe's sharp hearing caught words like _escaped_ and _trauma._

"Again?" she replied in dismay, only to sigh heavily as the woman whispered more. _Cooked, sterile, useless_. Fun words that set Eesu's navy blue feathers a-ruffle in a way Poe had never seen before – they stood straight out from her neck as her head drew down towards her body, as if she were nestling her pointed chin into a very fluffy black scarf. It might've been comical if she hadn't looked so dispirited, arms around her drawn up knees as she sat slumped on her own plump cushion.

A rapid clicking noise—her claws drumming against the dark polished floor as she brooded.

Poe shared a look with BB, who rolled protectively closer.

"Go, we'll deal with his replacement later," Eesu said to the waiting woman, dismissing her with a flutter of her hand, and the door clicked behind her. "Apologies," she muttered to Poe out of habit, her round amber eyes staring sightlessly into the middle distance as she thought.

"So that screaming naked guy didn't work out, huh?" Just a shot in the dark, but his aim had always been good enough to justify it. The way Eesu's eyes snapped to his, as if he were the first juicy grub of the morning to wriggle free of the dirt, reinforced his confidence. "That sucks. Maybe shouldn't have shot him."

"You say much but you understand little," she said, sounding so similar to General Organa that he had to grin.

"I understand it sounds like we both need help, so why don't we give each other a hand?" Clay teacup balanced on his thigh, he patted BB-8 when the droid gave him a low warning whistle. He knew what he was doing. Mostly. "You said something about a replacement," he said, cheerfully owning up to eavesdropping. "Is it dangerous?"

She chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment, gazing at his hand resting against the droid's side, but her claws stopped clattering against the ground and her feathers lay flat once more. "No," she said finally.

"Is it permanent?" Poe wasn't the most patient person in the galaxy, but he'd finally gotten the hang of dealing with Eesu. Simple questions that left no room for equivocating got him the best results, he just had to keep throwing them at her.

At least he thought his question was simple. Eesu's eyes flicked from his face to his shoulder, to the room beyond him, and then back, before she asked him something in return that he was not prepared for: "Define permanent."

"Uh…" He shared another look with BB, who rolled back and gave him the droid equivalent of a shrug. "Do I have to stay here? Forever? Until I drop dead?"

Another one of those pensive looks before she said, "Not you." Taken at face-value that was reassuring, but the way she said _you_ gave Poe pause.

He drained his teacup and set it on the wooden stump that made up the low table between their cushions. "Lady, if you want to make any headway you're going to have to meet me halfway here, okay? I already told you why I want to find Tekka, so now it's your turn to explain what _I_ can do to get that information, alright? Enough games."

At first he thought he'd annoyed her, given how her feathers poofed up again, this time all over her visible body. But when she looked down at her own teacup he changed his mind. She wasn't irritated, she was embarrassed.

"This is not a game, Poe Dameron," she said. "It is a serious matter for my people. A life or death matter. If you have found me withholding it is only because they are my sole concern, no matter how important your conflict with the First Order may be. If I tell you anything at all, it could place their future in jeopardy."

He could respect that, and said as much. "You have my word I won't spread whatever it is around," he added, and tapped BB. "Right, buddy? Strictly confidential."

BB-8 beeped an assurance at Eesu, the closest the droid could get to a salute, and to Poe's great surprise she smiled when he relayed the meaning. It was a very small smile, but it was there.

"I believe you, hatchling," she said, inclining her head to it, feathers laying back smooth.

If Poe were anyone else he might be annoyed that his droid got on better with the locals than he did, but he wasn't. BB was a charmer, plain and simple; sometimes it came in handy.

"Now, what's going on? No holding back."

 

Poe swallowed nervously as he waited for the holoprojector to connect to the secure Resistance channel. Convincing Eesu to let him contact his squad at all had been a feat, but she'd relented after he told her they'd doubtlessly come looking if he didn't ping them back in a day or two.

Luckily for him, Jessika answered. If it were anyone else he might've let something slip, but her cool professionalism kept him steady. "Commander," she said, eyebrows drawing together at the sight of his serious face. "What's up? Things go sideways with the Kraava-Taali?"

"Uh, no." The two brawny-looking Kraava women standing by the door, openly watching him, squashed any desire he had to tell Jessika what exactly was going on. That was the only upside, really: not having to explain on pain of death. It was a hell of a lot easier to say _everything's fine_ than it was to admit he was going to be an intergalactic sperm donor to a society of single moms. He knew he was seriously helping them out, but he couldn't stop feeling kind of weird about it. Growing up with both parents had left him with a bit of a skewed perspective, he supposed.

Not to mention he'd never expected to live long enough to be a father.

He cleared his throat. "I'm going to be here a bit longer than I expected. I have a lead on Tekka, but I'm going to be planet-side for another four or five local days."

Her frown lessened as she casually said, "I'll let the General know, but in the meantime try not to blow anything up while you're there."

There were a number of responses he could've made to that, all of them with very precise meanings ranging from _come get me now I'm being held hostage_ to _these people are in league with the First Order so come get me now before I'm tortured to death_. Thankfully he went with the most harmless: "You know me. I can _say_ I'll try not to, but…" _Things are weird but I'm fine_. If only she knew how weird.

Her laugh had a tinge of relief, and her frown was truly gone when she said, "Call us when you're on your way back, you know how the others worry."

If they had any idea what he'd gotten himself into this time, he doubted worrying was the thing they'd be doing. Ribbing him endlessly was more likely. "Roger that." After ending the transmission, he rose and clapped his hands together. "Ladies. Shall we get on with this?"

 

The tests only took half a day, which was Poe's first clue that Eesu had again been holding back some crucial details.

"I thought you said this would take longer," he gasped, wiping the sweat off his forehead after completing his last test: endurance. A handful of fitness tests had followed noninvasive medical screenings that BB had found immensely interesting, though they amounted to nothing more than Kraava scientists clucking over whatever results they got from a pinprick of his blood, his spit in a glass. The intelligence exams had been easy to the point of boring, the co-ordination drills slightly more interesting, but it was the spin in a gyroscope that had thrilled him most.

 _Faster, faster_ , he'd yelled deliriously as his seat spun and whirled around, BB little more than an orange blur in his vision, and he'd grown so demanding he'd been sure they cranked up the speed just to see if he'd black out and give them some peace.

As if there was any chance of that; he'd ridden worse at the academy.

"If I walk a straight line while doing a handstand, can I go back in for another round of that?" he'd asked the Kraava attendant who unstrapped him.

Unfortunately not, and now Eesu gave him another answer he didn't like.

"I said the _ceremony_ takes days, not the screening," she said, watching as the attendants removed the various electrode patches they'd stuck to his body while BB chirped repeatedly, concerned they'd forget one. "It is not my fault you misunderstood me."

There was a strong possibility she was right, he privately conceded, tugging the waistband of his borrowed exercise pants back up from low around his hips and retying the drawstrings as he remembered their very frank conversation.

 _My people breed on a cyclical basis, Poe Dameron_ , she'd started off reasonably enough. _The Molting nearly decimated our society, and though we have defeated it we may yet not survive it. We are still vulnerable._

_With all of our men dead, we have been reduced to… outsourcing._

A trickle of sweat rolled down into his eye as he snorted. Outsourcing. That was one way to put it. When Eesu agreed to be straight with him, she hadn't been kidding.

Towel draped around his neck, he sat down on the end of the idle treadmill and braced his arms on his knees. All that jogging around the base must've paid off though since he hadn't been dismissed yet. "Am I fit for duty or what?"

Eesu looked again at the datapad one of the many scientists had given her and nodded. "Based on your species compatibility, yes. You have a number of genetic defects-"

"Wait, what?" He nearly pushed for an explanation but one of the white tunic-wearing attendants brought him two large clay containers of liquid. Not water, but something pink and tangy-smelling. And tasting, he discovered, ignoring BB-8's audible paranoia and feeling immediately refreshed as the attendant left with the now-empty containers.

"-But they fall well within the acceptable range," she continued blithely, tapping at the screen, pupils visibly dilating for a moment in surprise as she took in the latest information that announced itself with a soft _ping_. "In fact, given your various test scores, you have become rather in demand as a donor."

"Yay me?" He shrugged one shoulder at BB, who was still expressing some concern over the litres of mystery fluid he'd just chugged. "Citrusy," he answered the droid's curious beeping. "Like [grapefruit]." Surely they wouldn't poison him _now—_ they needed his sperm, after all. He was integral to their survival!

Eesu held out the datapad to him, a flick of her finger sending the data scrolling up in a dizzying fashion until it stopped abruptly and she pointed at an empty line. "If you consent, we will proceed. It will take three days, with a fourth for you to rest and review the information we give you regarding Lor San Tekka."

BB-8 let out a wary series of tones, deeply reasonable given the circumstances, but Poe didn't see the point in reading it all over, even after the earlier mix-up. "I already agreed before, so unless you've suddenly changed your mind about cutting bits off me or biting my head off after this is done…"

"Of course not," Eesu said, blinking guilelessly. "That barbaric practice was outlawed lifetimes ago, long before the plague."

He paused, thumb hovering over the screen as he struggled to decide if that was irony or sincerity in her voice before he gave up. "That's… reassuring. I guess." There was a faint heat before he lifted his thumb from the surface, leaving behind the swirling glow of his print and a smear of oil.

Hard part done, he wiped his sweaty face with the end of the towel again, blinking heavily. He wasn't out of shape by any means, but he also couldn't remember the last time he'd run so much – he was more the _sprint for your life_ type. Short bursts of speed.

Exhaustion left him bemused by her quick bow, feathered arms straight at her sides. "The Kraava-Taali are grateful to you for your sacrifice."

"Always happy to help," he said, too tired to wonder at her strange choice of words. Artificial insemination wasn't exactly a trial; all he had to do was jerk off a bunch. Big deal. He was fourteen once, he could handle that. "I'm popular, huh?" Must be the flight suit, he reasoned. Ladies love a man in uniform.

She nodded, fingers flicking over the datapad's surface. "Far more than the man you're replacing. Even after suitability filters are applied, there are at least two nests' worth of viable recipients. Most likely three."

Three nests? "How many of you fit in a nest? Like two, right?" Brow furrowed, he struggled to focus on Eesu looming over him. The lights limned the edges of her navy feathers, giving her a faint halo that was distracting. "So, six? That's not very many. Why is this going to take three days?"

"A nest contains twenty, Poe Dameron," she corrected him, snow white flecking leaving tracers through the air when she moved to watch BB-8 roll up beside him, nudging his knee. "We do not yet have the technology to perform artificial insemination, so the time is needed for physical coupling."

Gravity had gotten a lot stronger; he gave up leaning on his elbows to lean against BB instead, whose usually melodic beeps had become atonal with concern. "I'm fine, buddy, but… three twenties? Sixty?" Eyelids threatening to close, his head dipped forward only to jerk back up as he struggled to stay awake. "Wait, you want me to have sex with sixty… What?"

BB's shrill chirps were barely cutting through the fog in his head. When the attendant from before reappeared, he noticed how soft her feathers were against his bare shoulders more than how leaden his limbs were as she eased him backwards.

"It's okay, buddy," he slurred as his eyes shut. "But… sixty? Aren't you ladies gonna buy me dinner first?"

"If you truly require a meal before every coupling, Poe Dameron, then I'm afraid the ceremony will take far longer than three days," Eesu said from the dark, voice piping directly into his brain from somewhere above him, louder even than BB's whistle of alarm that chased him down into sleep.

 

Poe didn't really wake up until he was in the refresher with water as hot as it got streaming over his head, through his hair and down his face. As he stepped out of the way of the showerhead, sputtering and wiping water off his face, a dark brown-skinned hand darted out and flipped the tap to _off_. "Hey!" A fluffy towel struck him mid-chest as he was still blinking droplets out of his eyes.

"Quick now," said the Kraava woman—Miraa, if he remembered correctly—before dragging him forward by the arm to start towelling his hair dry far too briskly.

"Stop, stop, you're messing up my part," he said, grouchy thanks to his aborted shower and her attempted battery. He stumbled back, knocking her hand out of the way to grab at the smaller towel, clutching the larger she'd tossed at him before his damp and very naked body. "I can do it myself, I'm not a baby."

"Quick then," she said, leaving him to it and [hurrying] out of the room and back in with a small patchwork bag whose contents clinked as she set it on the counter to lay another smaller towel on the floor. "Stand over here," and drummed her ebony claws on the tile floor when he didn't move fast enough.

"Why do I get the impression you're in a hurry?" he asked airily, leaving the towel for his hair hanging over his shoulder. No caf, all of ten minutes in the shower—this was not how he liked to wake up after passing out mid-conversation and sleeping like the dead for sixteen hours while they did who knew what with his droid and to his body.

Yeah, he was a bit cranky.

"I have no idea," she said, deep brown feathers slowly creeping upwards in annoyance as he took his time wrapping the larger towel around his hips and adjusting it before sauntering over to stand where she'd indicated. Miraa might have shared a number of physical characteristics with Eesu—a handful of inches on him, sloped shoulders and predominantly dark colouration of skin and feathers—but personality-wise they didn't have much in common. Eesu's close-mouthed demeanour came from a place of diplomacy; Miraa's came from a place of dislike.

"Then what's the rush? It's not like I have anywhere to be, right? The bed's right there, so…"

They gave each other equally baffled looks until Miraa, feathers relaxing from their exasperated ruffle, pulling out small pots and brushes from the bag. "You're not staying _here_ ," she said, removing the lid from a pot and revealing a shiny gold paint she stirred carefully with a brush before stepping closer, dragging the damp towel from around his neck and dropping it at his feet. "The process takes place in the main hall in less than an hour, but your preparation is… time-sensitive. Hence the urgency."

Apprehension growing, Poe watched as she painted a broad gold stripe along his shoulder and down the side of his arm. Sparkly. "No line-up outside my door? 'Take a number and have a seat'? One at a time?"

It was hypnotic how her feathers fluffed up in a wave, forming a ruff and revealing her consternation while her facial expression remained neutral, eyes focused on the task at hand. "No, Poe Dameron, they're not lining up outside your door. The process-"

"See, _you_ call it a process, Eesu called it a ceremony-"

At last he got a more pronounced reaction: a drawn-out creak as her claws curled against the damp tiles of the refresher floor, and her bright yellow eyes locked on his face. "The _ritual—_ there, a third descriptor for you—is an ancient tradition that has only recently been revived. It is important to my people, a symbol of renewal and a return to prosperity after The Molting. You will perform in public, as will my sisters, for the good of the flock."

Poe swallowed thickly as she dipped the brush in the pot and carried on. Sixty women had been bad enough, but now he had to have sex with them in public too? Hanging upside down from an angry Hutt's fist in the middle of a prison planet without a weapon in sight had sucked, but it hadn't set his heart pounding like this did. If Miraa noticed how his chest rose and fell more rapidly, each breath shorter than the last, she didn't comment.

"Towel." Paint and brush clutched in one hand, she made to tug at his towel, stopping only when he grabbed at it instead, keeping it where it was. Given that she had no visible eyelids, it was a foregone conclusion that she would win the resulting stare-off.

Would they stare at him like this in the hall? Was this cool regard all he had to look forward to for the next three days?

"I guess I better get used to this," he grumbled, pulling the corner of the towel free where he'd tucked it in at his waist. There was nowhere to hang it—that's what he told himself instead of admitting he was fidgeting, shielding himself with it, until Miraa's claws again scratched against the floor impatiently. The only warning he got before she snatched it from him to toss behind her. BB-8's affronted beeping gave him a good idea where it landed.

His pulse continued to climb as Miraa considered his naked body with a clinical eye, and when she dropped to a crouch to continue painting he realized just how interesting the walls of the refresher were.

Was that wood? Strange choice for such a moist environment, but then the Kraava-Taali did favour it-

"Stay still," she said warningly, fingernails pricking his ankle after he jumped when the wide brush swept down the outside of his thigh.

Nodding would've been a mistake so he didn't. "Ticklish," he said instead, voice cracking embarrassingly. What the hell was wrong with him?

Nerves. It had been a long time since he'd felt nervous about _anything_. Normally he was too busy charging head-first into a  catastrophe to feel much besides the combined surge of adrenaline and duty to the cause, and they hadn't failed him before. But now… He nearly wiped his sweating palms against his thighs but checked the motion at the last nanosecond; he didn't need Miraa to put any more holes in him.

"How big _is_ this main hall?" he asked in what he thought was a casual manner, staring at the condensation on the walls, pearling on the whatever they'd sealed the planks with. Doing his best to ignore the sweat prickling on the back of his neck, the tickle of the paintbrush as it swirled around his ankle.

"Big enough." Surprising enough that she answered at all, but after a few more brushstrokes she rose from her crouch, recapping the paint pots and considering him with some satisfaction. Entirely personal, he was sure. "Don't worry, you'll not be judged on your performance. It will be enough that you are there; the rest is taken care of."

The assurances didn't make it very far before they were sucked into the black hole that was his growing anxiety, pulsing steadily in his chest as she left him alone briefly. Public speaking, tight spaces—he didn't have a problem with any of that. Certainly not heights. And yet his heart was doing a hundred megalights a minute at the thought of what awaited him.

 _You're was helping them_ , a small and extremely reasonable voice in his head piped up. They needed to rebuild, and he was providing a valuable service! Not to mention they had critical information on Tekka's whereabouts. And once _he_ was found…

Sixty little Damerons running around in ten months, shrieked another voice, far louder than the first. Or however long it takes the Kraava-Taali to gestate. _Sixty!_ And that was providing none of them had twins.

That was a lot. That was a lot of kids. His kids.

"I don't think I can do this," he said when Miraa returned, a deep orange robe tossed over her arm and a smaller tray of tiny brushes and pots of colour in her hand. "Not that I don't _want_ to, 'cause I totally do, but- Well, my species…" Unthinkingly, he glanced down, seeing unnatural stripes and a total lack of enthusiasm. Yup, not into this scenario at all. "Look, guys like me, sometimes we can't get the engine to turn over. Did that ever happen with your men? You wanna make the jump but you can't quite get the hyperdrive up and running?"

She tilted her head and stared at him, huge eyes unblinking. "No. Hold this." When he inclined his head to look down at what he was holding, she seized his chin. "Up."

"No? Really?" It was difficult to talk when she insisted on holding his face in place, thumb pressing into his chin, but the alternative was to stand there and blush silently at her so he managed. "Never ever? I don't think I believe you," he said, but her thumbnail was a crescent pressure against his jaw that sent shivers through him. Maybe he did believe her after all.

"I told you before: you will not have an issue. Open your mouth." She smeared a layer of paint over his bottom lip that he wanted to lick away but didn't. The dark pencil was next, tip sparkling until it was too close to see, reduced to a rapidly-moving ebony blur in his periphery. Finished with his eyes, she stepped back, touselled his hair unexpectedly, then draped the robe around his shoulders without any visible worry about smearing the paint she'd worked so hard to apply. "I assume you can work a belt all by yourself?"

He could once she took the tray away and freed up his tingling fingers. Must've been clutching it too tightly; he fumbled the belt.

 

The attention he'd received when he'd first shown up was nothing compared to what he got on his way down to the hall. No direct comments, just the constant weight of eyes on his back as he followed Miraa through the complex, whispers trailing after him like smoke.

Well, the eyes were mostly on his back. They were also on his chest, his legs—the robe wasn't any longer than his knees, and not as heavy as he'd hoped. Its bright orange was a beacon for Kraava attention, worse than his flight suit. Was it just the colour or was it something else?

The tingling in his hands, the tightness in his belly hadn't faded but increased. He also felt a little faint, though that could've been from hunger as much as nerves. Nothing to eat at all since the day before, and the only thing he'd drank were a few thirst-quenching glasses of a tangy green juice that Miraa'd promised was absolutely not drugged.

"You must hydrate," she'd said sensibly, and that had been enough for him.

But now as he neared the hall he regretted it, almost as much as he regretted telling BB to stay behind. "I'll be fine, buddy, don't worry," he'd said, giving the droid a thumb's up with a confidence he hadn't really felt for once.

The hall was large, the ceiling characteristically high, the dark wood floors and walls polished. Rectangular tapestries of various sizes hung from the rafters and on the walls; his normally keen vision failed him though. As they swayed in some draft, whatever scenes they depicted were mere blurs of colours and shapes. The lights, also hanging from the ceiling, were slightly hazy as well—were they candles, unsteady light flickering and confusing?

Ignoring the distant crowds of women and their low chatter, he turned to Miraa. "You drugged me, didn't you?"

"Yes?" She shrugged, the green of her tunic rippling like grass before the wind. "I _did_ say everything had been taken care of and you didn't need to worry."

"I thought you said you were going to tell me before you did it." He distinctly recalled her words, forced out when he was still half-asleep and uncooperative.

_My name is Miraa and I promise to inform you whenever I drug you, no matter how much of a waste of time that is._

"I made no such promise," she retorted promptly enough to inspire doubt. "Now drink this and stop that. They're waiting."

He stopped fiddling with his belt, the silk slipping from his hand like water through his fingers. A bead of sweat was rolling down his side, diverting enough that while she'd been talking he'd been seriously considering opening his robe so he could watch it slide down his naked skin. How she'd known that he couldn't be bothered to guess.

The tall clay cup she passed him, passed to _her_ by one of the white-garbed attendants from the previous day, was full nearly to the brim with more of that tart green juice. A different green from her clothing, more like the swamps of Dagobah, and altogether unappetizing no matter how delicious he remembered it being now that he knew how responsible it was for the heat that suffused his body, the way his heart pounded erratically like comet dust on the windscreen of his X-Wing.

Before him, the waiting women turned as one to stare at him with their sixty pairs of yellow eyes, swaying back and forth under the lights like ferns.

Sixty. In this cavernous room, barely a quarter full, it didn't seem like such a high number after all.

He took the cup from Miraa and toasted her with a grin. "Bottom's up."

The weight of one hundred and twenty-two—twenty-four, he corrected, seeing Eesu by a table in the center of the room once the crowd parted—was palpable as he strode across the room, blood rushing through his veins, the floorboards silky smooth against his bare feet. Whatever had been in that last drink wouldn't have been out of place on XXX during a party week, but he knew it wasn't entirely the drugs that made him wink at one woman, waggle his eyebrows suggestively at another. No, that was his own sheer bullheadedness.

If he was going to do this, he'd do it right.


	3. The one where Poe ends up sold to a spoilt rich girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set during The Force Awakens. What if Poe didn't recover from his amnesia following the crash on Jakku? What if he went in the wrong direction? And what if someone with more money than sense bought him?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This actually had a very detailed plot that would dovetail back with TFA, but the length overwhelmed me. More original characters than I can justify. Ends abruptly.

It was already the worst birthday on record and Lila hadn't even made it out of bed yet.

"What do you _mean_ you can't make it?" she whined at the holo-projection of her no-good traitor of a cousin.

"I can't leave now, Aral needs me for the geosurvey," Tasia said apologetically. "He said we have to finish up before the planting season or else-"

Lila waved that away. It was too early for farm talk. It was _always_ too early for farm talk. "Did you tell him it's my birthday?"

"Yes. Of course." But Tasia clasped her hands together, let her long sleeves fall over them, so Lila knew she was lying. She used to fidget as a little girl growing up in Lila's home, and thought now if she hid her twisting fingers no one would catch her out. Lila, a practiced liar, had given her the tip in the first place. Idiot.

Tasia probably hadn't told him at all. She probably didn't want to _come_ at all.

Just like everyone else. Convenient excuses all around. _My half-brother died and I'm leading the funerary rites. My grandmother wants me to rewrite her will. I have final exams. My parents grounded me. I have to participate in some quaint local ritual or risk being branded as a heretic and forfeit my inheritance._

Fine. To hell with all of them. Lila was more than capable of amusing herself.

"Have fun measuring corn or whatever it is you're doing," she said, slapping her hand on the _end_ button before Tasia could defend herself against Lila's snide tone. Mouth twisted unhappily, she flopped back into the soft mass of embroidered silk pillows, feeling disappointment settle on her like a suffocating blanket.

She'd only resigned herself to accepting her recently-married sister's absence because she'd been _sure_ Tasia would more than make up for it, and now look where that had gotten her. Why couldn't Tasia's stupid brother do anything by himself? Tasia should've been here entertaining her, not out there playing farmer. Out in the _sun_. Ugh.

The scent of verbena drifted up from the pillows as Lila rolled over onto her side to stare dispondently out the distant windows of her bedroom. Overlooking a white marble balcony and the sparkling blue lake beyond, but it was the sight of a pair of birds winging past that perked her up, reminded her of her parents' promise.

Perhaps the day wouldn't be an utter loss after all.

 

Full of anxious hope and with nothing better to do, Lila sat at her desk and scrolled through her messages, picking at the breakfast one of the servants had brought her. Everyone else seemed to be _doing_ things while she was stuck all by herself with nothing else to do but ignore the flashing alert that said her mother had contacted her sometime while she'd still been abed. She really couldn't take another disappointment at the moment, not while her blood sugar was so low.

In contrast, the servants all had things to do, some firm direction, and for a moment she found herself wishing she was like them, guided through life by surety of their place in the universe. But that yearning lasted only as long as it took her to peel an orange in one long curling ribbon, a servant moving forward sweep it away.

"Leave it," she said, and slapped his hand. "I like the smell." As if she needed to explain herself to a servant, but he bowed his head and backed away meekly.

To think she'd been momentarily envious of a _servant_.

And really, she was much happier out here than being stuck in the capital, where there was a new scandal and a new fad every half-day. Exhausting. Not to mention staying in the capital would've meant staying with her parents, and they'd only gotten clingier after her sister had wed. Atrociously clingy.

Case in point: this latest message, which she really couldn't stomach putting off any longer.

"Happy birthday, sweetie!" Her mother crowded the screen to make kissy noises, injection-fresh lips huge and visibly damp against the screen. How old did she think her daughter was, twelve? Lila rolled her eyes through the rest of it, picking flakes of polish off her nails as her mother nattered on about Daddy, how much they missed her, how she really ought to call them and blah blah blah special day for a special girl. Such a snorefest when all she wanted was one teensy tiny bit of information. Besides, it was their own fault if they missed her!

"…I know you had your heart set on it, angel, but try to see it from _our_ point of view," her mother wheedled, makeup streaked down her face. "Surely there must be something else we could give you? A unicorn, perhaps?"

Lila's attention snapped back from droll consideration of her cuticles to the screen, where her teary-eyed mother was engaging in her usual hysterics, now prattling on about safety and- She flicked her fingers to the left, rewinding a few seconds, and then again when it just landed her back at _our point of view._

"Your father and I have talked it over and really, we just can't agree to piloting lessons this year," her mother said, lip trembling like a gelatin tower freshly dropped from the mould. Whatever she said after was buried under Lila's shriek of rage and the subsequent crash of the plate being hurled across the room.

Shrieking was a very tiring business so she didn't carry on for very long, and unfortunately her heavy breathing didn't mask the remainder of her mother's words.

"Never mind the insurance premiums, after what happened at Serila's reception—not that it was your fault! We're not punishing you!"

Lila rolled her eyes like an angry fathier and scoffed loudly, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "Of course not, being exiled to the wasteland was a reward. A health measure," she said with biting irony.

"-But we just can't risk it. I know we promised, but what if something were to happen to you? An explosion, a crash, and you so far from home!" Now the tears overflowed, the cause of the awful streaks down her streaks. And again, the _angel_ , _our point of view_ , the unicorn. Imploring her daughter to be reasonable, to ignore her parents' betrayal.

Not that it would work, of course—Lila had declared after her last birthday that she was above material goods, would never ask for anything ever again because gifts were spiritually unfulfilling. Instead she'd asked for only one thing: piloting lessons. Something immaterial, useful, _freeing_. Something utterly foreign to her daily existence. As usual, her parents had agreed faster than light travelled, going so far as to promise her the very best instructor, the latest model of speeder, some time on the raceway to practice. The works.

But that was before Serila's wedding. Before that stupid little incident. It was just a duel! Who cared about blood oaths of vengeance? And it was irrelevant because a deal was supposed to be a deal.

"Just say the word, honey, give us the barest hint, and we'll-"

The bright chimes of an incoming comm interrupted her mother's gross display of desperation. Lila huffed impatiently when a servant cleared the remnants of her breakfast away slower than she wanted, the chimes growing louder. Finally, when they were done and gone at last, she inhaled deeply and whisked her hair over her shoulder so it would appear to the viewer to be an artful plum purple tumble. She might have been upset but that was no reason not to look good.

"Please tell me you're coming right over," she said, not bothering to conceal her hopefulness.

"'Fraid not." Chin resting in her palm, hunched close to the screen, Claudia actually looked depressed. Maybe because she hadn't bothered to draw on her eyebrows. "The old bat's driving me crazy."

Lila perked up slightly at the thought of someone else having it worse than her. At least she didn't have to deal with ancient smelly relatives. "That bad?"

"She keeps changing her mind about who should be executor," Claudia said with a grimace. "I'm this close to grinding some sedatives up and mixing them into her pudding just to get some peace."

"Then you could name _yourself_ executor." Lila laughed at Claudia's thoughtful expression and pulled a section of dry orange free from the mass to pop into her mouth. Firm on the outside, but juicy and sweet on the inside.

"Better not. Too much work later on." Claudia stuck out her tongue at the thought. "Speaking of work, happy birthday. I'm surprised you're out of bed."

Lila tried not to let her see how pleased she was by the observation. Of course Claudia remembered, she remembered _everything_. "Can't stay in bed _all_ day," she said, grinning at Claudia's low, knowing laugh.

"Bored, huh?"

"Tremendously," she admitted.

"The hair gives it away." Claudia sat way back in her chair, crossing her long arms carelessly over her chest. "I won't bother suggesting you go outside..." She was looking at something above the screen and didn't notice Lila wrinkle her nose at the idea. She drummed her fingers against her bare bicep for a beat or two before saying, "Hire a show? Eat your weight in dumplings? Buy something? Buy a lot of somethings and put it on your daddy's account?"

"When don't I?" But just the thought of browsing another dozen boutiques or jewellers on the holonet left Lila wilting with renewed boredom in her cushioned chair. "There's nothing to buy," she said, the whine from earlier returning.

"There's always something to buy." Claudia tapped her coral lip. "What don't you have?"

"Besides company? Nothing."

"So buy some."

Lila looked up from the sections of orange she'd separated and arranged on the desk before her in a tiny pyramid. "What?"

"Buy some company." Claudia was keeping a straight face, but that didn't mean anything. "That's what my crazy grandmother did after Pop-pop died."

"That's not the ringing endorsement you think it is."

"She got a really cute one, too." Right before her eyes, a smile began to break across Claudia's face. A slightly dreamy, slightly maniacal smile. "Oh my god, you should totally do it."

If Lila had been anyone else she would've been afraid to ask, but she wasn't. Instead she shoved her hands under her bare legs, dressing gown sleeves pooling around her arms. "Do what?"

"Buy a pet to amuse yourself with." Attention and smile firmly fixed on her, Claudia said, "Something to cuddle."

Lila rolled her eyes. "Tacky. Bedwarmers are _so_ three seasons ago."

"Spoken like someone who doesn't own one," Claudia said, waving her finger at her. "You should see Momo's. She might be demented but she's got good taste. You should get one. It's not like you don't already have everything else."

Lila couldn't argue with that. "My parents-"

"Would _freak_." Claudia's smirk matched her own slow-blooming one. "They're all worked up over that blood-oath or whatever, right? You tell them you got a bedwarmer and they'll think you're going to be murdered in your sleep. Your mom's hair would totally fall out again. 'Bloo bloo anyone could be an assassin!'"

The droll hysteria was familiar enough that Lila let out a gagging sound of disgust automatically. "Don't remind me. One little death threat and they _strand_ me out here-"

"Yeah, you're real stranded in that dump of yours." Claudia leaned all the way forward again, as if she could see the rest of the room beyond Lila and was examining it closely. "How many pools does it have again? Twenty?"

"I don't have _any_ ," Lila said with a sniff. "I have a lake."

"More like a ocean." Claudia flapped her hand, bangles slipping down over it with a rattle the microphone clearly transmitted. "Anyway, if I find out where Momo got hers, you have to promise me you'll do it."

"No promises," Lila hedged, the way years of dealing with demanding parents had taught her.

"No, you gotta this time. This is going to be the most painful conversation of my life. She's literally over a hundred years old. Please." Claudia's expression was the most pathetic she'd ever seen. It _had_ to be the lack of eyebrows, it made her whole face look upset. Or upsetting. Either way, Lila wasn't about to mention it, just in case it was an aesthetic decision. She didn't want to look like she was falling behind trend, even if she totally was because her wretched parents had consigned her to the damn wastelands.

And besides, if it was just a mistake Lila would get to hear about it later and have a good laugh.

"Fine," she said. "But only if I see anything worth buying."

"Fab."

 

Three hours later there was a bright _ping_ of a new message. Lila shooed the servant polishing her nails away to flick it open, skimming the contents. The dealer's name and net address weren't familiar, but she could practically hear Claudia's grousing as she read the postscript: _Spent two-and-a-half hours talking about all the things Teddy—she named her fucking bedwarmer_ Teddy _and I mean that fucking in both the modifying and verb sense uggggh—can do with his fingers. Been nice knowing you, have to go cut off my ears and boil my mind clean of these images. Happy birthday to you._

As the servant saw to her toenails, Lila opened the body dealer's digital catalogue. The design was outdated but serviceable, displaying a rainbow of species sorted neatly into different categories: labour, military, expendables, and so on and so forth.

"How tall _is_ a metre-and-a-half, anyway?" Lila murmured to herself after browsing through the companion section for a mind-numbing number of minutes and settling on one startlingly appealing twi'lek girl. The pictures, though hi-def enough to catch her eye, were useless now—she couldn't tell anything _about_ her. The endless scroll of statistics—ranging from height and weight to the cost-cruncher measurements of carbon intake and lowest oxygen allotment required to live—didn't say anything about her personality. Was she clumsy? Did she cry when shouted at? Important things to know.

Lila drummed her newly buffed nails on the arm of her lounger, producing a series of metallic clicks as she thought. She hadn't _wanted_ to go out, had been quite committed to staying in and moping in fact, but the air would probably do her some good. And besides, she'd never seen a meat market before. Doubted any of her friends had. She'd be the only one!

Mood lifting, Lila clapped her hands together briskly and pulled her tingling toes away from the servant crouched by her feet, a second servant bowing near her shoulder with a whisper of fabric.

"What does one wear to a slave market?" she asked.

The servant, Balla, pursed her lips. "Something practical. It's very dirty, lady, crowded, moistures everywhere. I wouldn't-"

Lila had stopped listening at _practical,_ which was lucky for Balla because she hadn't asked for her opinion. This time. "Print up the pink one and ready the ship. I'm going out."

 

Balla had been right, though she'd never tell her that. The market _was_ crowded, full of the unpleasant smells of bodies, both alive and dead, left in the sun for the thirty-odd hours that made up a day on this backwater planet. Lila had been raised too polite to give lower castes any public sign of her disgust, so she sat cross-legged in her shaded sedan chair and made no attempt to cover her nose.

Besides, the smells just added to the experience. The rank sweat of thousands, the tang of blood and warm stench of waste—this was nothing like the holo-log, so sterile and boring. This was _interesting_. The noise—shouts of auctioneers, bird-like chirping of bidders, the conversational din of other shoppers, the practiced patter of salesmen—all made Lila feel positively nostalgic for home. She missed the bustle of the capital, the people, she thought, twisting around in her seat to watch with glee as they passed an organics recycler in an open pen, grinding up a body in its metal teeth.

Her guide, a toydarian by the name of Jatto who was so fat he barely stayed airborne, turned again to her and said, "Surely mistress would prefer to take refreshment in one of our lavish-"

"No," Lila said, not bothering to look at him. "Just show me the one I asked about."

The toydarian bowed his head, sweat beading on his snout, and flew on, her mechanized sedan chair and entourage following him deeper into the market.

Everywhere there were stalls and pens, stakes and fencing and slaves alone, in pairs, groups large enough to work Aral's stupid farm. Their clothing was as ragged as their smell was bad, items frequently mismatched, and Lila considered them all in passing with an interest more for their apparel than their condition. Everything was so unrelentingly _brown_. There, a whip-thin zabrak, with layered patchwork vests and shabby bubble-legged trousers that made Lila's pink cloud of a dress look positively ethereal. And to her right, a cute little borsean, skin orange as the fruit Lila had eaten that morning and twice as bruised. The dark marks on her skin looped around her arms like bracelets, reminding Lila of all the jewellery she'd brought to the estate with her that she hadn't gotten a chance to wear.

At last she reached her destination and discovered that a metre-and-a-half was too short for Lila's liking.

"If mistress wants, we could have her lengthened," her guide said, twisting his stubby fingers together.

"No, don't bother." Lila waved the teary-eyed twi'lek girl away, back into her pen, and slouched in her chair with a sigh of disappointment. It wasn't like she was picky, she just wanted exactly what she wanted. That she didn't know precisely what that was yet didn't matter to her. When she saw it, she'd know.

Eyeing the ten-foot-wide packed dirt aisle, the curving stretch of pens, she tapped her fingers against her bare arm before rubbing one of her eyelash-thick rings. "Are all the rest companions as well?" At least it wasn't so smelly here, and a bit cleaner.

Jatto nodded vigorously. "Oh yes, mistress, the best-"

"Yes, yes, do be quiet," she said, shifting her weight slightly forward so the sedan began to glide down the aisle, forcing the oversized gnat out of the way. Pen after dust-coated pen, and she peered into all of them, looking for… something. Something not too tall, not too short. Not fat, or too thin—she'd be afraid of breaking it then. Human, or humanoid at least, and with a pleasing number of fingers, she thought, fondly remembering Claudia's grandmother. Her smile faded when she noticed the hungry way the slave before her returned the look, and moved on to the next.

Body after body, each of them wrong in one way or another, and Lila could feel her brain starting to harden up with the letdown of it all when she heard a shout, a ways down the aisle.

"Yeah, yeah, alright already!" A male voice; Lila watched curiously as a buzz of toydarians surrounded what looked to be a human, herding him along with blunt-tipped spears. He stumbled over something in the uneven aisle; there was a crackle of electricity, audible even at her distance, and the human let out a yelp as one of the slavers gave him a shock.

Instead of keeling over, the way she'd seen others do so, the slave—for surely he was one—spun around and rushed the gnat responsible, holding off on attacking only because the rest of the crowd forced him back with spears and shocks alike, shouting abuse at him.

"Fine, I get it," the slave shouted back hoarsely from where he bent over protectively, hands clasped before him, then straightened up with an aching slowness before he resumed walking. It was more of a limp, really, a shuffle Lila found difficult to ignore as he drew nearer. But not impossible, not like the half-smile he gave her with chapped lips as he passed by, his own entourage careful to keep him distant and apart from hers.

"Hey," he said with a rasp, looking directly at her face after letting his eyes wander over the rest of her, barely rocking as one of his guards gave him a quick slap up the back of the head, ruffling his dark hair.

"Do not speak," said the guard.

To her delight, the smile spread wider across the slave's dirty, red-smeared face, and he looked over his shoulder and winked. At _her_.

Lila didn't bother watching where he went, just clapped her hands together. Winked! How dare he. She had to have him.

Her guide flew near immediately, wings blowing a stiff breeze of his stink into her face. Her nose didn't so much as wrinkle, which she was proud of. Always polite.

"Jakko, Fatto, whatever your name is- I want that one." She thought the statement self-evident enough that it didn't merit pointing, a gesture for people who weren't used to having their every whim predicted by their staff.

Jatto wasn't one of her staff. "That- Which? This?" He looked into the pen before her, which housed a blank-faced chiss.

"No, not _that_ one," Lila said impatiently, then tilted her head apologetically at the chiss. "I'm sure you're fine, you're just so… you." She looked back at her guide. "Take me to see the fighty one."

"That _wermo_? He's not…" The toydarian's wings faltered a moment under her unimpressed regard, dipping him low to the ground, before they resumed beating the air at normal speed and he rose slightly, like a ship on the water. "Yes, mistress. Though I should warn you, he is not fit to kiss your boots."

"I decide who kisses my boots, thank you very much," she said, turning the sedan to follow him out of the companion section and into- Well, she wasn't sure what. The fighty section, she supposed, looking around with interest as slaves of all species and conditions banged on the bars of their pens, yelled things at her that would've made her mother's ears shrivel but only just further piqued her interest as it caused her entourage to draw protectively closer.

At last they reached the human of interest, who crouched towards the back of the pen and made no effort to throw anything or screech at her like the slaves on either side, for which Lila was grateful. It was getting tiresome.

"Hey, hey," said Jatto, and rattled a claw against one of the bars. "Here, come here so the mistress can look at you."

The slave unfolded from his crouch but stayed where he was, hands now behind his back. "Why doesn't she come in here?" he asked, with no trace of the Coruscanti accent she herself possessed in his tight voice. He inclined his head and bowed like a holo-host on one of the mid-day shows her mother watched. "My charming abode."

"This is why mistress should consider another," Jatto muttered to her. "New, hasn't learned good manners."

"I want to see him properly," Lila said, ignoring him as usual. "Open it up."

"Others are better-suited to you, have…" Jatto made a rasping sound at the look she gave him, and dropped down to the ground and his own two grasping feet. "Yes, yes, as mistress commands," he said, snout trembling again as he swiped his security cuff against the lock and swung the pen door open, darting inside to shove the slave down to his knees with a heavy hand on his head. "Down where you belong, dog."

Sedan chair at its lowest hover, Lila was still far above the slave's eye-level. She liked his height though, even on his knees, and the way he rolled his eyes at the toydarian's posturing. "You winked at me," she said.

"Did I?" He didn't bat an eyelash. Too busy taking in the impressive sight of her, she assumed, judging by his shallow breathing, how his eyes skipped from her to her entourage and back. "Don't remember."

"I remember." She took in his scuffed but well-fitting trousers, tight over his thighs; his stained yellow shirt that clung to his sweaty body, rusty splotches around the open neck. Was it yellow by nature or as a result of his extensive time in the sun? He was solidly tan, and again she wondered if that was by nature or not.

The blood on his neck, face, forehead—that was not natural. Interesting, but not natural.

"Are you always rude like that?" she asked.

"Not always," he said, smile very compact and eyes fierce. "Sometimes I'm worse."

Lila couldn't resist clapping her hands in girlish glee, unconsciously mimicking her mother and startling her entourage before holding her hand out for a servant to steady her as she rose from her cross-legged seat to stand. Tower, really, she _towered_ over the slave. But what Lila liked best of all was how his eyes widened when her dress, diaphanous in pinks and hints of purple, billowed out wrinkle-free despite her lengthy sit. Like a cloud, she thought happily, and touched a hand to the curls and loops of Lilac hair that swirled around her head. She'd had to lighten it that afternoon before she left, but the effect was worth it. Natural looks were _so_ in.

"Nice dress." The slave's eyes weren't as wide as before, and there was something more calculating in his gaze that she found as interesting as the old blood on his forehead, streaked and dried over his temple.

She could be coy when she wanted to be. "So lovely to meet someone with taste." Grip tight on her servant's hand – one of the bodyguards her father had insisted accompany her everywhere once she hit age of majority—she stepped down off the chair with a hop, setting the bells on her anklets to jingling. The dirt was baking, and she clenched her bare toes, feeling the dust, the millions of feet before her that had stomped it down. Perfectly level, just for her.

The slave was looking at her feet, or maybe her wiggling toes, the gradient of colours on her nails glittering in the light. The dusk motif was her favourite colour scheme.

She stepped into the pen, Jatto waddling out of the way nervously, banging the railing when the slaves to their right began to hoot. Ignoring them the way she did everything beneath her, Lila circled the slave, trailing her hand over his shoulder—hot—and noting how the sweat pasted his shirt to his back. His very well-muscled back, she thought critically, marking also how his hands clenched over and over beneath the thick manacles around his wrists, tiny lights flashing in the restraints, alternating red and blue.

He jerked away when she twisted a lock of his lank hair around her finger. Dark, but that could be mostly mud.

"Get up," she said when she stood before him again, and snapped her fingers.

It was not an easy climb for him, hands restrained as they were, but he managed. Maybe a bit slower than he could have, but she wouldn't hold it against him. Nor his cocky stance, weight mostly in one hip.

That limp, she remembered. At least his height was decent. "Are you strictly decorative or do you have any skills at all?"

"Not _strictly_ ," he said, rolling his shoulders back before continuing with an air of smugness, "I'm sure I can do things you'd like."

"Hm." Like Daddy always said, never let them see you're interested.

It helped that he smelled, and he was badly in need of a soak. Again, she wondered how much of his appearance was owed to grime—the dark stubble covering his jaw and throat had a certain aesthetic value, though one that hadn't been in fashion for a while. The scattered cuts on his face, his heat-cracked lips, had never been in fashion, though they added an appealing roguish flair.

Lila stepped close, pulled his damp shirt forward—not the cheapest material but nothing she'd stoop to spitting on—to look down the neck until he stumbled back.

"Whoa, I don't think so," he said with a laugh. It was the hint of anxiety in the sound that made her let go, and he backed up unsteadily, feet slapping loud on the ground.

She frowned but the glimpse of firm chest and dark hair beneath a long thin metal necklace kept her annoyance at being denied in check. "Why don't you have any shoes on? All the other ones do."

Bemused, he looked down, then pointedly looked at her feet before shrugging, leaning back against the bars and subtly taking some weight off his leg while simultaneously displaying himself to greater advantage. "You don't either."

Skirt rustling, she turned and walked out of the pen, past Jatto, back to her chair. She wiped her fingers on the sleeve of the closest servant before taking the offered hand of her bodyguard to climb up, sinking down in a _woosh_ of fabric, legs curled beneath her, feet out for one of her entourage to carefully brush clean. "Fatty," she said, crooking her finger at the toydarian, hovering to the side and keeping blissfully silent until now.

"Mistress?"

"Have his feet washed. I don't want footprints all over my carpets."

 

It had been three quarters of an hour and Lila ran out of things to look at forty minutes ago.

Sipping the awful drink one of the toydarians had brought her upon entering the squat building, she paced back and forth, examining the low racks of collars and cuffs with a level of attention she spared her beverage glass. It likely had been used by other people before, had touched others' lips.

She glanced at it. Was that… a fingerprint?

Behind her, past her crowd of vassals and still cloistered in the tiny office, the only member of her entourage who wasn't a servant dickered over prices with the toydarian clerk. Yante was her father's man, paid generously to keep her expenses to a minimum. Because no one said no to her, this meant his only job was to negotiate, which he did tirelessly. Normally she didn't mind, as it kept her daddy happy and off her back, but at the moment all she wanted was to throw her drink in one of the many fake plants and go home before it ate through the pot and left a hole in the floor.

On the bright side of things, it didn't smell so much inside. And the clay floor, though not spotless, was at least cooler beneath her feet than the ground outside. And soon she'd be home with her new purchase! Her own little birthday present to herself.

"These are not for you, mistress," came the purring voice of a zoltan woman. She'd crept up on Lila without her noticing, and now stood a metre away, past her ring of servants. At Lila's nod, two stepped aside and let the woman draw near enough to reach past her and thumb a hidden button recessed in the wall above the racks. A panel slid silently down, obscuring the cheap goods while revealing plexi cases of sparklies. "Mistress's eyes should never have been forced to rest on such ugliness. Forgiveness."

Lila passed her drink to a ready servant and paid no attention to the bowed black head, focussing instead on the artfully arranged collars resting on thundercloud grey velvet. Encrusted with jewels, plain to the point of asceticism, and everything in between, but all of them clearly of superior quality than what was displayed before, and vastly out-classed the cheap chain and tags the slave had been wearing. Lila poured over these new items with enthusiasm, thinking of the possibilities. One for every day of the week? The year? And she could match to her ensembles, the seasons, her _mood_ -

"Does mistress have a preference of colour? Or material?" The woman waved her red-skinned hand over the corner of the glass. It popped open with a hiss; she drew out one of the velvet boards, bearing three collars in shades of green for Lila's inspection. "These are do'brek leather, genuineness. Not vat-grown."

"Acceptable for some," Lila allowed before shrugging. "I want something a little less… ordinary."

"Ah, discernment." She slid the board back without a trace of bitterness and pressed the plexi home again, then tapped her fingertip to the corner of her lips, thinking. "What is mistress shopping for? Description of wearer? Helpfulness."

"Well, he's…" Lila paused. Her first instinct was to say he had an Outer Rim mouth and manners, that he had a cool disregard for her status she hadn't seen in any servant or slave in her life, but none of that was helpful to a mere accessories peddler in a place like this. She wasn't at her private designer's atelier, who would probe for personality, mood, favourite dessert. Remember herself, where she was.

And where was _he_? Her new pet. They'd said they were going to ready him for departure, but what exactly did that mean? A bath? What were they doing with him? Lila felt like stomping a foot in annoyance, mostly at herself. Could never expect half-wits to become full-wits over the course of a conversation. Her fault.

The zoltan waited patiently, amber eyes on her nose, as was polite. Rude to stare, the way her new pet had.

Lila cleared her throat. "He's-"

A door banged open, interrupting her.

"Lady," murmured a servant behind her, and she turned to see Yante striding out, followed by the clerk. His face was the usual smooth mask, but his chin was up, shoulders back, and Lila knew that however her parents howled about her latest purchase they wouldn't be complaining about the cost in the same breath.

"Lady Dar," Yante said, tipping forward in the slightest bow, hands palms-up and open. She could see the faint pinprick on his right index finger—still using blood signatures out in the wilds. How barbaric.

"All done?" she asked, her hands held out above his but not yet touching.

"My lady will be most pleased, I think," he replied coolly, and it was only due to long familiarity that she could make out the self-satisfaction in his hooded eyes.

"Excellent." She pressed her hands to his smooth ones and went up on tip-toes, bells jingling, to kiss the air above his cheeks. Twice and showy, to demonstrate how valuable he was to anyone watching. Near-family, her actions said.

"A token, mistress," whispered a servant on her left once she was done, proferring a small white card to her, held carefully with both hands. "With felicitations from the shopkeep."

Lila rubbed a finger over it, feeling the textured drag of real cardstock instead of common flexi. _Mul'caja_ read the embossed Galactic Standard in the corner, a comm number picked out discretely down the side of the name. Lila had to crane her neck to see over the shoulders of the two or three servants between them, but she could see the zoltan woman standing demurely before her cabinets.

_Sparklies._

"Keep it for later," she said. She might still buy something. Something _else_.

The servant nodded once and stepped back, ready to be forgotten.

Afterwards she turned to the disgruntled toydarian. Could've been Jatto's twin. Could've been Jatto himself, for all she knew or cared. They all looked alike to her. "Now, where's my new toy?"

 

Giving in to the desire to stomp her foot in aggravation proved to be a terrible choice and one Lila would take back instantly if she could. She was used to carpets with thick pile, velvety and lush as the healthiest jungle moss. Not this awful clay floor that was scratchy and hot and that she was sick to death of, and just to be petty she stomped her foot again with a harsh slap of skin meeting stone.

"He can't even _stand_ ," she snapped out at nobody in particular, crossing her arms. Yante, behind her, stood silent.

The toydarians, as far as she could tell, had not washed his feet. But they had done things she _hadn't_ requested.

Lila grabbed the servant's wrist and repositioned it so she could see the bill of sale more clearly, make out her slave's name—Poe Dameron. Definitely from the Outer Rim, one of those planets where pedigree didn't matter because what sort of name was _Poe_? Who would pass down something so devoid of reference or history? It didn't even _mean_ anything.

"Poe," she said with disgust, not missing how he lifted his head in bleary-eyed recognition. Poe. It sounded like _poor_. Who names their kid 'poor'?

She'd have to name him something else. Later, though. At the moment she had bigger problems.

"I thought you were just going to give him a bath," she said through gritted teeth to the clerk at her side. "And you couldn't even do that right!" She reached out, gripped Poe's hair and gave him a slight shake so the powder coating him rose in a glimmering yellow cloud. "What _is_ this? This isn't clean! It's everywhere! It's on my dress!"

"A delouser, mistress," said the clerk, hovering a bare foot or so off the ground. "Kills the vermin."

"God, you're worse than barbarians," Lila said, reaching back to wipe her hand on the sleeve of one of her servants. A new record for times she'd done that in a single day; this place was making her as bad as her aunt. Next thing she knew she wouldn't set foot outside her estate for years and whine about germs and precious bodily fluids all the time.

Similar to what she was doing now.

"Why didn't you bathe him properly?" she continued. "Did you even do his feet the way I asked?"

"Oh, uh…" The toydarian's googly eyes darted back and forth, thick fingers fidgeting. "Yes, yes, mistress, yes. Just-"

With a roll of her eyes, Lila snapped her fingers at the two servants holding Poe upright, his arms slung over their shoulders. They stepped back, then each tightened their grip on a wrist and lifted him. Another cloud of dust shook off him, then a third servant lifted his leg so she could see his foot while Poe muttered incoherently under his breath.

Lila let out a screech at the sight of his dirty sole. "Look at that! Look!" Patience snapped, she grabbed the toydarian by the snout and shook him so he squealed. "That part should be _pink_! Haven't you ever seen a human? _Pink!_ Not blue, not yellow, not green, not purple, and certainly not brown. _Pink_ , you idiot!"

The toydarian let out a pitiful whine that just incensed Lila further.

Grip tightening on the clerk's snout, his yelp loud in her ears, she wasted a glare on Yante. "Did you tell them I wanted him clean?"

"Of course, lady. Unfortunately…" Yante spread his arms, then clasped his hands with a muted clap. "I am not their overseer. Had I known they could not follow _basic_ instructions…" His impassive expression held no sympathy for the toydarian clerk.

Lila gave him a hard shake, jaw clenching down on another shriek of irritation, then let the ugly creature go.

Unprepared to be released so suddenly, the toydarian lurched backwards, lost altitude for a moment and thumped against the floor in a daze, stubby fingers covering his snout. "Y-yes, mistress, yes, sorry for the mix-up-"

"Oh, it's too late now." Lila waved a hand at her servants to set Poe back down before snapping her fingers for another servant to step forward. "No, no, the disinfectant," she said, inhaling sharply. This planet was comfortable but none of these hideous gnats were used to it; they were _moist_ and it was _on her_ \- Her skin crawled. She needed a bath.

In the meantime, the servants hadn't released Poe, which was for the best since he'd only end up facedown on the ground again. He'd barely been able to walk when the toydarians had finally dragged him in, and the five microseconds of standing he'd done on his own had apparently been all he was capable of.

"Mistress, please, the dust will absorb into his body, then no more mess!" The toydarian implored her from a distance, eyes wet; stupid, but not too stupid not to learn to tell her things she didn't want to hear from beyond arm's length. "He wouldn't cooperate, and water is so-"

"Just shut up," she said, shaking her hands in sheer aggravation and to dry the disinfectant spray. So much for a calm ride home, now she'd have to worry over whether her new pet was going to puke all over the ship or stop breathing and die or some other stupid, stupid thing. Not to mention he was still _disgusting_ , and he stank of some chemical now instead of his own grubby sweat and-

"I'm leaving," she said, whirling around to loom over the toydarian. "I'm leaving, I'm going home, and I'm going to tell all of my friends about my _terrible_ experience here, and then you'll. Be. _Sorry_." Punctuating this statement by stabbing her finger into the uppermost part of the toydarian's snout was childish but satisfying, as was the hard shove she gave him. "Get out of my way."

A nasty review. That's what she'd do. And she'd put out a blast over the holonet. Lila never broke a promise, and she _loved_ writing reviews. She had a blog.

Feet slapping flatly against the floor as she stomped off, entourage naturally reforming around her, she shouted back over her shoulder, "I'm sending him back if he drops dead because of you. Fuck your return policy."

Her mother would've died of shame to hear her say such a thing, gone to her grave protesting the unladylike behaviour, but to hell with it. Sometimes a lady, even one of Lila's breeding, needed to renege on a business contract.

 _Final sale: no returns or exchanges_.

Whatever.

 

* * *

 

  
He remembers the desert. Waking up alone and calling for-

A name. Someone. Gone.

He walked-

 _Tell the truth now, Poe_ , admonished a motherly voice.

He stumbled. He staggered. Over the endless sand, uniform golden orange and stretching in every direction. Up the side of soaring dunes, scratching his knuckles as he scaled them, his booted feet growing heavier, harder to lift with every step. He cooked in the unforgiving sun and moved continuously forward because lying down and dying never seemed like an option, no matter how exhausted he grew. And when he couldn't go forward any longer, when the combined discomforts grew too much—his empty stomach glued to his spine, the lump on his head feeling like it could burst into flame at any moment after long days with his head covered only by his thin shirt, his peeling sunburnt skin – then he'd sleep. No rest there, just more pain, or the memory of it. Brittle yet penetrating; the echoes of his shouts, ricocheting off the looming dunes like laserfire off a durasteel bulkhead, would wake him.

Unnerved, Poe would get up and resume his march under foreign stars, the unshakeable sense of being chased urging him on. Forward, always forward. Looking for… something. Some relief or remembrance. All he had was his body, and his clothing stiff with the salt of dried sweat, his tags clinking against his chest. The metal burned but he wouldn't take them off, invaluable because they were his. _DAMERON, POE_. Knew enough to recognize his name, even if the rest of it – the string of numbers, the collection of random letters – was meaningless. If he didn't have a direction, a goal, a memory, at least he had his name, and he guarded it jealously.

"A bit warm to be out walking by oneself in this country, my friend," said the blarina, the first person he'd encountered in days. Half his height and amiable enough, but Poe was more interested in his speeder.

"Not my first choice," he said in a parched croak, eyeing the vehicle. Small, maybe too small for him, but instinct told him he could make it work. It would do.

"No, I imagine not," said the blarina, showing a vast number of teeth in a wide grin. "Jakku's sunshine is seldom kind to humans. Where have you come from?"

"I'm lost," he admitted. Sharing the truth was easier than wetting his lips. "I hit my head and I'm lost."

"Lost." A hiss from the blarina, like oxygen escaping into vaccuum. Regrettable and dangerous. "How unfortunate for you. And where is your speeder, friend?"

Too casually asked. Poe tensed, so to realize the vulnerable position he'd put himself in, and struggled to think as fast as he was able despite the distractions of screaming thirst, the tightness of his skin. The pulsing lump on his head. "Lost. Same as me."

"Hmm." Another hiss, then the blarina raised his mirrored sunglasses, set them on top of his smooth bald head. "I'm Naka Iit. A scavenger of sorts." Large golden eyes raked over Poe's form as the grin widened. Teeth, many more teeth. "I might just scavenge you."

Obvious trouble, but Poe's options were slim. So he talked. He talked Naka Iit into giving him a gulp of water—the rustiest, brownest, warmest, most delicious water he'd ever drank. He talked Iit into giving him a lift to the nearest town in that speeder of his, the confines as cramped as Poe had feared. He talked him into letting Poe save them both from competing scavengers, hands steady on the unfamiliar controls of the speeder, sure of himself in a way he couldn't remember feeling before as he maneuvered through exhilarating twists and turns and bursts of speed.

"Wonderful! Marvelous!" Iit exclaimed after Poe left their pursuers in the dust and they were hurtling smoothly along the sands. "Where did you learn to drive, my sun-struck friend?"

"My mother taught me." It rolled off his tongue so cleanly it had to be true; Poe squeezed the controls of the speeder, searching for any trace of nostalgia and finding none.

"Well, I owe you, and her as well, honoured lady." Iit clapped him on the shoulder, then settled back in his seat with a happy squirming. "Yes, I will speak with Ohn Gos, my kinsman in Blowback Town. We'll get that bump on your head seen to, and you will leave Jakku one way or another, never fear."

"I'm grateful," Poe said, relief replacing his prior flush of new-found confidence. His headache already felt like it was easing.

That smile again, stretching impossibly as the blarina lifted his snout and hissed a laugh. "Yes, you will leave. My word."

 

Blowback Town was little more than a collection of lean-tos dropped arbitrarily in the middle of the desert and left to die. But there was a bustle of people that made his heart leap, even if they were strangers and all the noise did nothing to improve his headache. Strangers only to him; as he followed Naka Iit down the main drag, all sorts hailed his rescuer, some friendly and some not so.

"Yes, and tell your mother I'll see her tonight!" Iit called across the avenue to a tancreet that had shouted something rude first and had to be held back by its companions. "Pay no attention to him, my friend," he said in an aside to Poe. "We have more important business, yes?"

Right. Getting off Jakku. He'd had enough of the sun. "Where's this Ohn Gos you mentioned?"

Iit hissed. "Patience, patience. I'll introduce you soon enough, and then we'll see what can be done with you."

 _Soon enough_ turned out to mean going to the far end of town and waiting in a queue outside a long mud building, but what was ten minutes more walking after the last few days? At least now the terrain was flat, and they did their waiting under some sun-bleached awnings of woven straw so Poe didn't mind so much. Instead he kept doing a hurried count of the number of people ahead of them and thinking about what he would say to Gos. Admitting he was lost again seemed unwise, but what if they asked him where he wanted to go? He hadn't even known where he was to begin with, and recalling the name of any planet or city he'd been to was about as successful as wringing water from a rock.

The line shuffled forward, and again he counted. Fourteen people in seven pairs, many of them blarina. But the only other human in sight was six spots up; he didn't want to risk losing his place in line. And when she entered the hut she did not emerge, despite pairs after going in and coming out with little pause. That left him with no one else he could carefully probe for information or charm, bond with over their common humanity in strange surroundings. No, instead he was again on his own.

Poe had to stoop a little when they finally entered the building, and his eyes took some moments to adjust to the dim light. Another blarina seated behind a low desk, two doorways beyond, curtained with heavy drapes that revealed nothing about the other rooms.

"What have you brought me today, Iit?" Ohn Gos wasn't any taller than Naka Iit but he was half again as wide, with small eyeglasses that gripped the bridge of his snout and a dark green vest covered in pockets that shimmered as he sucked on the end of a vaporizer. "Another runaway?"

Wait, what? "No, I-"

Iit clapped a hand to Poe's arm and gave him a warning squeeze. "No, not at all. My friend here, he saved me from the Strus clan."

At the name, Gos exhaled a heavy cloud of steam, the smell of which made Poe's eyes sting. "Scum. They've been crawling all over our patch lately."

"Yes, and they would've crawled all over _me_ if my friend hadn't been there," Iit continued, giving Poe's arm a waggle. "Now, seeing as how he is stranded, I thought I'd return the favour and see that he gets back to his own people."

Eyeglasses giving him a near-sighted look, Gos planted his clawed hands on the desk and stood up, leaned over it to examine Poe from his boots all the way up to his face. "You are human, then?"

"Last I checked." There was something odd about how Iit pushed him toward the desk, close enough so that Gos could sniff him, pinch his arm. "Hey!"

"Have you been injured, friend?" Gos hauled himself up on his desk, crumpling parchment beneath his feet as he stood up, vaporizer waving dangerously. He reached for Poe's face with one hand, hissing when he leaned away. "I only want to examine you. There is much blood. We can mend you."

"I'll pass on that," said Poe, an ill-defined suspicion growing in him. "How about you just drop me off at the nearest human colony and we call it even?"

"The _nearest_ human colony?" Gos removed his glasses with a flourish, wiped them on his vest before replacing them. "There is a colony nearby—not strictly a _human_ colony, but you'll find no shortage of your kind there. Far more than here."

"That would work." At least he hadn't been forced to come up with some lie. Really, any human settlement would be fine—he was confident he get back on his feet if he given the chance.

Gos traded a look with Iit, then stuck his vaporizer back in the corner of his mouth before he hopped down off the desk. "The usual percent deducted from your account, of course."

"Of course," Iit said, a glint of teeth as he looked up at Poe, who was perplexed by the sudden mention of costs. "Don't worry. I said I'd help you out, didn't I? And you have helped me."

Poe was about to thank him when a droid rolled out from behind one of the curtains, sped towards him and stopped after knocking into his foot. With a whistle and a beep, telling him to hold still, the droid did a thorough scan of him, the flickering blue light travelling the length of his body before it whistled again, lower.

"Yeah, I knew that," he said tiredly, resisting the urge to touch the large bump on his head while the blarina were goggling at him. The droid was easy to understand despite its strange accent. A click in every third word that might have been a result of internal damage or grit in places it shouldn't be.

"You parse droid?" There was something about how Gos asked, so similar to Iit's earlier questioning, that caused Poe's wariness to grow. "That must be very useful."

"You might want to do some maintenance on it," he said in answer as the droid rolled back behind the curtain. "It clicks when it talks. Dust, most likely." He'd said it on impulse, a natural desire to help, but the smile that crept across Gos's round face gave him second thoughts. Third and fourth thoughts, after the blarina traded glances again.

"I'll remember that." Teeth visible, Gos rifled through his parchments, vaporizer rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other as he searched. "Ah, here." He pulled out a stack of flimsi, blew the dust off it and produced a stylus from one of his many pockets. "Your name, friend?" At Poe's hesitation, he explained: "For the ship manifest. I'll have you on the first ride out of here, after my medical droid gives you something for your head. Get you on your way, hm?"

A prickling feeling, like an itch in the back of his skull as Poe considered the curtain, thought of the droid beyond. Rolling about, no one bothering to clean out the dust.

 _I have to go back,_ he'd said. _There's-_

"As I promised, friend," Iit said, intruding on his thoughts with a smile, sunglasses pushed up on his head so Poe could see his eyes crinkle and those rows of teeth.

"Yes. Thanks," he said, and rubbed his throbbing temple, wisps of memory fading. The close air, the unhealthy waft of the vaporizer's steam – they weren't doing him any good. He reached for the stylus.

 

* * *

 

  
Lila was going to end up with wrinkles and it would be her new slave's fault.

"What's wrong with him? Is he broken?" From her reclined position on the low sofa that dominated the cabin, she prodded Poe's shoulder with her toe again, looking for some response. All she got instead was more of that low muttering he'd been doing for the last ten minutes and the silvery jingle of the bells on her anklet when she nudged him harder.

"Do you think I would purchase damaged goods, lady?" Yante, seated on a cushioned stool, paged through the stack of flimsi documents the clerk had given her. The receipt, something on care and feeding, the bill of sale plus all sorts of instructions and warnings and pamphlets Lila couldn't be bothered reading. Perhaps later, if she had trouble sleeping.

"He's basically a foot stool." Propped against the end of the sofa, Poe reacted to Lila's poking as much as furniture would.

Yante added another page to the pile on the low three-legged table beside him. "Was that not what you wanted?"

"A little livelier that this," she grumbled, ignoring Yante's snort as she rested her foot on her slave's shoulder. She'd insisted on clean clothes before letting him on board, and even if he hadn't been nearly unconscious she doubted he would've objected. Purchased hastily from a print-to-order dresser after she'd rejected the appalling toydarian selection – stripes at _this_ time of year? – his new ensemble was of much better quality than what he'd been wearing before. Most importantly, it was pristine, and the loose pants and long-sleeved shirt were inoffensive design-wise even if their weave didn't feel remotely natural and the slate grey colour was utterly uninspired.

No more grey, she decided. Green? Or maybe red next time. Not just red, crimson, or- She'd have to think about it. Important decisions couldn't be rushed.

But clean clothes and a spray of deodorizer only fixed his most egregious physical problems, and did nothing at all to stop how Poe whispered to himself and licked his lips now and again, distress writ large over his flushed face for a microsecond before it faded and his glazed eyes slid shut once more.

Thanks to the steady observation she'd been doing, Lila knew he would be silent for a quarter of an hour or so before he'd rouse, stir his clumsy limbs in an attempt to get up and fail dramatically. Poe had managed it only once since her servants had carried him into the ship after her and deposited him on the floor, a measured distance from her custom paisley rug. Used the sofa to climb up on unsteady legs, brace himself on the solid arm, ragged fingernails digging into the brocade as he looked around in dull confusion. One step, two, three, and then back down he went with a heavy thump, a wretched moan, his ugly identification tags spilling out the front of his shirt.

Really, she almost felt bad for him. _Almost_. But he'd landed firmly on the rug and she couldn't forgive him for that. It was one of a kind! And now she'd never be able to look at it again without thinking of a dirty slave sitting on it. The effect was ruined.

Well, damage done. And at least there was no more of that awful dust shivering off him everytime he so much as breathed. Which he was actually doing rather quickly now. She could hear him breathing! A wheezing, irregular thing, and when she leaned over she could see his profile, how his mouth hung open like he was some sort of pond fish. It was irritating beyond belief. _Breathe like a normal person!_ she wanted to shout at him, but it wouldn't make any difference. He'd seemed fine earlier; what all had they done to him?

Troubled, Lila sat up, shuffled down the sofa and rearranged her skirt over her crossed legs. Now seated at the end, she was at an excellent angle for leaning over and examining Poe from above. If he'd been in his right mind he surely would've appreciated the view he had of her chest, but as it was he was facing entirely the wrong direction, with his head bowed forward like a drunkard at the end of a hard night.

He didn't respond at all when she steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder, slid her other hand beneath the simple metal chain to press flat against his chest as he laboured for breath. His heart was pounding through the thin material she deliberately kept between herself and his dirty body, knocking along like a loose shutter banging against a wall in a windstorm.

Unthinkingly, she rubbed slow circles over his chest, pleased with its firmness. Though his mouth didn't close, his panting grew less desperate, barely audible over the microfibre rasp against her palm, the clink of his tags, and he relaxed.

"Oh my."

Lila jerked her hands back, the way she had when her daddy had caught her trimming one of the servant's hair into something more fashionable. _Leave that alone, Livvie darling, it's not a toy_. But that didn't apply anymore, did it?

And Yante, brows arched, chin dimpled as he frowned while reading one of the sheets of flimsi, wasn't paying her any attention at all.

She looked back down. _Not a toy_. The visible dirt on the back of Poe's neck, metal chain glinting above the knob of his spine, made her fingers itch for a loofah and one of her many bars of soap.

A bath, she thought again, with greater determination than ever. Not just twenty minutes in a refresher, but a real bath with real hot water. If she was going to put him to his intended use then she wouldn't tolerate anything less than to have him scrubbed head to foot the old fashioned way.

Would she do it herself? Lila rolled the idea around in her head the way she would a fresh orange in her hands, loosening it up for peeling. She'd never done such a thing before; she rarely bathed herself. But then she'd never been to a slave market before and that had gone swimmingly, so why not this? And it wasn't as if there was anything complex about hair-washing, it wasn't like astrocartography or anything.

Warming to the idea, she slid her hands along Poe's shoulders. Broader from this angle than she would've suspected.

"Hm."

"What 'hm'?" Lila asked, with studied indifference. Yante would have to be more provocative than that; she was busy picturing a rainbow of soap bubbles on tan skin. "Something interesting?"

"Perhaps." Yante traced a stick of a finger down the page. "A list of vaccinations they gave him in preparation for departure. Though the pricing is a little high, there's nothing unusual here." His lips twitched in amusement. "They also chipped him with a locator beacon for you. How thoughtful."

"They should have asked first." Her sympathy grew incrementally for him; she squeezed his shoulders gently, pleased when they grew slacker. She'd never cared for physicians, and she'd always had the best; she couldn't imagine the bedside manner he'd experienced had been very good. "Is that why he's so out of it?"

"Because of the vaccines? No." Yante slid the sheet away and set it down on the side table next to his chair, on top of the pile he'd already perused. "No, they- Ah. Hm."

"'Hm' _what?_ " Considering the exceptionally trying day she'd had, Lila thought she was doing fairly well so far with the whole 'don't snap at the guy who gets you a discount' thing, but, unlike her family's money, her patience was not an unlimited resource. "Please, do grace us with your latest discovery."

"They gave him a sedative," Yante said unhelpfully.

She stared at him, looked pointedly down at her unconscious slave, and then looked back. "Really. You don't say."

"An extremely strong one," he continued, thin lips curling at the ends in a blink-and-you'd-miss-it smile. "And something else. 'Cantharides.'"

Cantharides? The threat of forehead wrinkles grew as Lila sat back, hands falling away from him, wondering why that name sounded so familiar. One more wrinkle to worry about. Happy birthday to her indeed.

Before her, Poe moved restlessly, legs sprawled out before him, hands in his lap. Like a droid that lost power, waiting to be recharged. The way his chapped lips parted on a shaky inhalation and his throat worked as he tried to swallow, head dropping back against the sofa, sparked Lila's memory.

_Cantharides._

The worrisome furrow disappeared in an instant. "How much did they give him?" Lila asked with newfound interest. She hadn't messed around with Candy in ages, not since she was a bored school girl with nothing to do but cut class and go to feel-ups.

Twining a Lilac lock around her fingers, Lila peered at her slave more closely, beyond the superficial damage. In the flattering lighting of the cabin, the potential she'd seen in the market seemed glaringly obvious. How thick his eyelashes were, fluttering against his red cheeks as he dreamed who knew what. How his hands, knuckles battered, clenched and unclenched where they rested against his thighs, spread an inch away from indecent.

Lila might not have been in school anymore but there was no denying she wasn't still bored. Her dress was a complete loss anyway, she'd never be able to wear it again without recalling the indignity of having been sprinkled with _flea powder_ , so slipping off the couch sit on the floor close by Poe wasn't as much of a sacrifice as it would've been hours ago. Especially not when she took a greater risk: inhaling deeply.

Nothing. Not the stale sweat from before or blood, fresh where his sun-cracked lower lip had split or dried and flaking in a smear on his neck, just above the seamless collar of his shirt. Whatever the servants had sprayed him with was a modern-

Sniffed again. Caught a whiff of… something.

In her periphery, Yante dragged one of the sheets back, finger drifting up as he skimmed the list. "Four milligrams."

Her eyes widened. "Well. That's… generous."

Abruptly, a faint moan drifted from Poe, and his hips rocked slightly upwards, thighs tensing and spreading incrementally further apart. Hands curled into fists, and-

There. A trace of sweetness in the air, like honeysuckle but with none of the earthy suggestion of leaves or nature. Just a pure sugar note, nostalgic, and Lila knew if he were hydrated enough to sweat he'd taste of it. Artificial sugar to lure in any nearby busy little bees.

Lila curled in closer, entranced by how his blush travelled down his visible body. She followed it with her fingers, traced her finger down the slim chain to tap his tags with a fingernail. It really was a very thin shirt – she could see his heart thumping away, could feel distinctly how his muscles tensed when she pressed her hand firmly against his stomach, just above his navel.

Another moan, louder than before, followed by more of that sweet breath and a bead of blood on his chapped lip. The fabric of Poe's pants had the same weave as his shirt, a strangely satisfying nap that felt like an itch being scratched under her skin; she'd have to revisit her previous thoughts on the virtues and possibilities of synthetics.

"I must forward the receipts on to your father," Yante said, rising from his stool.

Lila, transfixed, didn't bother to wave him away, just hummed vaguely in dismissal as she leaned forward to suck Poe's bloody lip delicately. A brief lap of her tongue against his rough flesh and he whimpered; a cloying gasp of air to go with the copper tang in her mouth.

Maybe those toydarians weren't utterly useless after all. She sat back, licking her own lip. Given how out of it he was, she was shocked she couldn't taste the tranquilizers in his bloodstream.

Without turning her attention from the way he rolled his hips slowly, pushing up against her palm gracelessly, Lila clicked her tongue. Instantly a waiting servant, hailed from a corner of the cabin, appeared at the very edge of her periphery.

"He's going to need fresh pants in a few minutes, and tell the pilot to pick up the pace," she said, pulling her hand away from the tented front of Poe's trousers to gently push his leg back down. She smiled as his head lolled towards her, breath hot and wheezing against her bare neck as she slid her hand up his inner thigh. "I want to be back before my new pet has a chance to ruin another pair."

 

There was a strong breeze when they landed, as if nature knew Lila need to clear her head of the stink of the market. The scents of abundant flowers and rich vegetation quickly replaced the reek of all those unwashed bodies. Sprawling gardens and pristine countryside surrounded the estate on three sides, the fourth dominated by the strip of beach that acted as a buffer zone between the house and the lake.

Lila, pulling hairpins loose, smiled contentedly. She might complain about missing city life but she did adore her little cottage.

Six servants stood waiting at the foot of the ramp. By the time she reached the bottom she had a handful of pins to pass to the closest servant, Balla, who held them in a cupped hand.

"You found success, I see," she said with a reserved nod.

A glance over Lila's shoulder revealed: her bodyguards in a loose ring around her at a comfortable distance; Yante, handing the stack of flimsi over to his secretary; beyond them, the rest of Lila's entourage, two servants helping her slave down the ramp from the ship. "I think so, yes," she said, resuming her walk towards the house. "He was cheap, anyway, or so Yante leads me to believe. You know how he is."

"Mm." Balla kept pace, wordlessly accepting another set of hairpins. "I assume you want him bathed? He seems a little… worse for wear."

"That's a polite way of putting it." Lila sighed, gathering her loose hair over her shoulder to play with as she thought. The colour had faded more after the brief time in the sun, in that pen.

Firmly downwind, ignoring the fact he'd roused enough to stumble along under his own power from the ramp to the entranceway, her servants carried Poe along behind her, determined to keep his feet from touching the verdant carpet that stretched down the main aisle of the house. Her parents bought the best help; they were always so careful.

"Yes, a bath," she said, finally answering Balla's question, mind returning to her earlier decision. "Take him to the smaller tub. And print him up something cute. You know what I like." She wouldn't mind a bath herself, a nice soak to wash off the commonality of that place.

If Balla was surprised he was getting anything other than the servants' fresher she didn't say anything, just snapped her fingers at the crowd behind her and signalled them in the right direction. There was a reason Lila had promoted her. "With or without bubbles?"

"I'll decide when I'm there," Lila replied lightly, ignoring the trace of sarcasm in the question. "And don't bother assigning anyone to him, I'm doing it myself." Leaving off fingercombing her hair as she strode into her dressing room, Lila raised her arms so the servants would have an easier time of removing her dress. "No one but me, understood?"

Balla's lips were a firm line as she handed the pile of hairpins to another waiting servant. "Yes, lady."

 

"You did it, right?" Claudia still hadn't drawn on any eyebrows. Had she really gone the whole day like that, or had Lila caught her after her evening ablutions? A mystery. "Please tell me you actually did it."

Lila had made the critical mistake of checking her messages after undressing. Another whining update from her mother; the usual form letter birthday wishes from her peers, scattered across the galaxy; and Claudia, with a series of progressively crankier calls, all about her oversharing grandmother and her own—possibly genetic—deteriorating sanity. The last had just been five minutes of Claudia screaming wordlessly into a throw pillow and Lila figured she should check in. Just in case she'd finally killed herself.

"Yes, I did," she said with a coy smile, adjusting the collar of her robe so it lay flat along the curve of her neck.

"Oh my god, your parents are going to lose it," Claudia said flatly. "Description now."

"His name is Poe, he's human, no picture yet because he's kind of dirty. That place was heinous. And he's…" Lila, curled up on her chair before her desk, scanned the records that had been forwarded on to her by Yante's assistant. "Oh. Around forty? Ish? Whatever."

"Wait, you _went_ there? You didn't even check to see how old he was before you bought him?" Claudia's exasperation was so loud Lila was tempted to put her on mute. "What the hell _did_ you check? He's got all his fingers and toes, right? I have so many questions."

"I wasn't thinking of it at the time." Shrugged as she scrolled through his stats. O Positive? Was that really something she needed to care about? Doubtful.

"Delilah Dar, did you _impulse_ _buy_ your sex slave?"

Lila flicked a glance at the screen and went back to scrolling, idly swinging the loose end of her robe's belt with the other hand. "You always manage to say that like it's so dirty." He weighed more than he looked. Weird.

"Only because I remember all the other times you've bought things without thinking!" Claudia shook her head, pointed her nail file at her. "You can't just throw him away when you get bored in two weeks, okay? He's not a pair of shoes."

"If I wanted to be lectured I would've called my mother," Lila said flatly. "I'm not going to get bored of him."

"Really?" A scoff, some pointed filing, and then, oh so innocently: "Then explain why you're here talking to me and not wherever he is, getting your money's worth?"

Her fingers froze, still crooked in a gesture, an inch from the screen. Somewhere a drugged up slave was standing—probably sitting, considering his unsteadiness—next to a bathtub wondering where she'd gone.

Actually, he was probably drinking the bath water. She was the worst owner in the world, she hadn't gotten him anything to drink! This was why her parents never let her have a pet.

"I… will talk to you later. Bye!" Lila didn't manage to wave the screen off before Claudia started hooting in laughter, but whatever. She had more pressing matters to attend to.

 

* * *

 

  
Something was wrong with Poe Dameron.

Correction: something _new_ was wrong with Poe Dameron. Something that ran deeper than the surface-level bruises, burns from the guard's shock sticks, more diffuse than the pang in his ribs when he took a decent breath or the spot on the left side of his head he was certain the droids had done the cheapest patch job possible on.

He spent longer than he should've sprawled on the smooth floor, savouring the cold that seeped into his overheated body and congealed the blood on his face. Fresh blood, nothing to be alarmed about.

The grogginess—that wasn't anything to worry about either. That was a known sensation, nearly familiar in his tiny lifetime full of the unfamiliar. The toydarians had gassed him, he remembered. They'd gassed him because he'd been bought, sold, packaged up and drop-kicked off the planet with extreme pharmacological prejudice.

_Nighty-night._

"Fuck you," he whispered, bruised cheekbone pressed against the tile.

They always said that right before his limbs went to sleep without his permission and dropped him flat on his face before his brain was polite enough to catch up. Woe woe woe to the next genius who decided he needed a time out.

Another minute or two. He'd be back on his feet.

 _Shake it off, Dameron._ Hey, he could take a hit. _Yeah, sure you can_ , she'd laughed.

Move forward, keep moving forward, leave it behind the way he'd been doing since he'd woken up. Figure out what he'd lost—besides everything—and make a plan. But, more importantly, he had to lie there a little longer, let the chill spread throughout his body and push away the heat.

He had to get up. He had to move. He had to-

His skin felt strange. They'd changed his clothes while he'd been offline. The silky material rubbed over his skin, made it prickle, a faint static setting all the hair on his body standing up as he shifted against the floor, felt his clothes against his body.

But that something else, slip-sliding underneath the mental haze like fresh water moving under a sheet of ice. The memory was gone in the sluggish blink of an eye but his lips pulled painfully apart when he opened his mouth, huffed hot sweet air against the tile at the thought of water. Felt a sudden wetness in the same instant; too good to be true, of course, but the taste of his own blood made him groan, and not from the pain of a lip splitting anew. He'd never win first place in Miss Outer Rim now.

Something was-

How could he still bleed when he was too far gone to sweat? Surely all the moisture in his body had long since dried up – the memory of it certainly had. He couldn't remember how the daily water ration in the pens tasted. Just facts, cold and hard as the floor: that it had been recycled and piss-warm and suspicious for it. Iit's canteen, an eternity ago: brown and slightly gritty. Poe smacked his lips at the thought and regretted it immediately as they stuck together with fresh blood. The taste sharp and sweet and wrong in his mouth. He wanted more and that had to just be thirst. He needed more.

Something-

It had to just be thirst. Everything felt tight. Dehydration would do that.

 _Up and at 'em_.

Elbows and knees first, feeling out the gravity—different from the pens. A different planet, and the knowledge didn't bother him. Up to his hands, adapting quickly as the fog in his head burned off—maybe that was the kind of person he was. A traveller, planet-hopper, used to a half kilo's difference here or there.

Elbows to hands, arms trembling as they bore his weight for an instance before he locked his elbows, ribs reminding him how much he disliked being struck on the side with steel poles. Discomfort faded when he noticed his tags swinging and felt relief for the first time in… He couldn't say. Still had his name, if not anything else.

Beyond the tags, hexagonal tiles, smaller than he'd thought for how tightly fitted together they were. Glass in shades of tan and taupe and dark earth, a welcome change from the days of blinding yellow sand on Jakku, the endless dirt of the pens that got in everything, and he'd carried it here, too. Smears on the shiny tiles where he'd rolled his forehead against the tile; he winced at the bloody smears over the geometric swirls.

 _C'mon, up you get, son_.

The room was airy and dim, not just because his headache kept his eyes half-shut. No binary stars here to squint against, just diffuse natural light from the center of the ceiling. He'd been lying—dropped, more likely—a rough metre into the room. The rest of it stretched out before him, empty of anything besides an unoccupied white lounger off to the side, a free-standing dark stone wall directly before him with thick shelves holding bottles and jars of various shapes and sizes, all matter of contents liquid and solid, and-

He blinked hard, pushed himself up to his knees to rub the grit out of his eye before he looked again. To the left of the wall, nearly blending into the light turquoise wall—a person. And another. Another. Back of his neck tingling, Poe got to his feet cautiously, wary of rolling his bad ankle again and unconvinced the figures around him weren't statues until he noticed how carefully they all avoided looking at him. Incremental adjustments of eyes and chins and necks, staying where they were but all careful not to look at him. Like he was the sun, _don't stare, Poe, you'll damage your eyes_ -

He swallowed thickly, pressing the palm of his hand to the side of his aching head. Curled his fingers into his lank hair and tugged once, painful, the way that woman—his new owner, he supposed, he'd been _bought—_ had in the market. Pulled it again, slower, before he dropped his hand. That- He was acting as weird as he smelled. This wasn't how he was. Something was _wrong_ -

"What's a guy gotta do to get a drink around here?" A simple enough question, asked as nonchalantly as he could manage in his desert croak, as if he hadn't been doing something crazy a minute ago. Maybe they'd forget if he- But talking hadn't really done him any good so far, had it?

Besides, the room absorbed his question like a raindrop on a dune. Not a single face turned to his, not an eyebrow twitched or an eyelash fluttered. Poe's gaze skipped from one still human form to another, a dozen of them, eerie in their perfect posture and bland disinterest. Their clothes, too, had a boring uniformity. Too casual for military, he thought, busy looking for signs of rank instead of wondering how he knew what to look for in the first place. Not a stripe or pip among them, no pins nor braided cords, a notch at the lapel or a sash. No splashes of colour for one not shared by others, just boring blue for everyone. Their plain loose clothes were similar to his own—were these the people who'd redressed him?

There was no way of knowing who'd been responsible. Surely not that woman who'd bought him—Poe remembered how she'd wiped her hand on her slave's shirtfront after touching him and knew she'd never stoop to it. But one of her slaves… This one? Or maybe that one, the slender wallflower of a woman with the pale eyes.

The burn on his leg itched; he knew better than to scratch, but pressure was usually a safe bet. Usually. Not this time. And rubbing the skin near it was a bigger mistake. The rasp of the fabric against his fingerpads, his thigh, made his breath catch.

The man standing across the room from him stared steadily into the middle distance. Had he been the one to hold Poe up as another worked his leather pants down his hips? Complained about how heavy he was, how uncooperative? His hands were loose at his sides, big squares with long fingers, and the sensation of being touched was all Poe had. Hands on his body, touching him, and at some point his scratching had turned into a slow caress and that was wrong. Stopped his rubbing and was carefully to keep his hands at his sides because if he didn't he'd start touching himself again. He _needed_ it, like he needed water.

Maybe more.

He moved closer to the living mannequins, idle stroll into more of a shuffle thanks to his various aches, eyes darting from here to there. Here, the curve of this woman's hips; there, that man's thick forearms. Thought about what they'd feel like under their clothes, if their bodies felt as fevered as his did, if the brush of their shirts against their chests made their hearts stutter the way his did.

Knowing he wouldn't get a response, Poe couldn't resist asking anyway, "Am I the only one not wearing underwear or what?"

As before: nothing.

Nodded, palms sliding against his thighs in a gesture that was supposed to be fleeting and turned lingering, regrettable. "I'll take that as a no, then," he said, laugh low and forced as he turned away. Focussed on the floor, those jars, anything other than the- Not lust. Thirst. There wasn't a single whisp of moisture left over from the haze of sedation that had evaporated from his mind, and now he was left with bone-aching dessication and a need.

The promise of bottled liquid, tempting pink and refreshing blue and sparkly cream, lured him in and nearly killed him. If he hadn't seen the hole at the last minute he would've falled in, broken his neck with his luck. As it was Poe staggered back, dropped to one knee with a shout when his ankle gave out.

It was immense: twenty-four feet across with a three-foot drop, ash white clay that curved here and there like an amateur's attempt at pottery. Generally round, with lumps of seats caused by a giant's careless thumbs, the amount of water it would take to fill it made him tremble. Ten thousand gallons at least, Poe thought, the calculations flicking through his head in an instant.

Math, some part of him noted, and distances. How much it took of one sort of mass to fill a space—it all came to him instantly. He wanted to be pleased at the revelation, the gradual shading in of his skills—numbers, a natural skill with speeders, droid-speech—but he was too busy scooting closer to bend over the tub's edge, searching for a faucet. There had to be some way to fill it, and nobody who spent the money a set-up like this implied would use anything other than the finest H2O.

Nothing. Not a tap, not a spout. The source of the room's illumination proved to be a skylight recessed in the ceiling. A perfectly round twin to the bath below, it could've been mistaken for a hole to the open air if raindrops hadn't spattered over the spotless glass while he watched. His face remained disappointingly dry—no hyper-expensive rainfall system here.

No rain, no water to be found, and no point asking again for a drink. Desperation had him leaning halfway in, running his hand along the side of the tub. Feeling for a hidden spout, jets, anything, he yelped when water soaked his sleeve and his entire body clenched up.

Motion-activated? Or maybe a proximity sensor, with a minimum mass requirement—it didn't reactivate when he waved his hand before roughly the same area as before.

Poe didn't hesitate, didn't think for a second anyone would stop him. They hadn't made a move when he'd almost fallen in, why would they care now? So in he went, and water immediately began pouring out of an invisible six-inch break in the clay, a hand's span below the rim. Mass, proximity, whatever it was he loved it. Bending over made his ribs complain but it was worth it—the water he gulped was so sweet it made his teeth ache, although that could've been the cold.

 _Chug, chug, chug!_ He grinned, letting the water splash against his face, run down his chin, throat, rivulets into his shirt that made his skin turn to gooseflesh before he resumed slurping. It wet his dirty feet deliciously as he drank, soaked the hem of his pant legs so they clung to his ankles, shins when he dropped to his knees so he could push his face against the fine grit of the tub's surface and let the water pour over his head. Hair plastered to his head, he braced himself with a hand curled over the rim as he leaned into the spray. The water was lapping at his thighs when he twisted so it streamed down the back of his neck, over sunburnt skin and down the line of his spine, glueing his shirt to his body.

Days, _days_ in the desert, maybe a week in the pens – it hadn't taken very long to break him down into this greedy creature. But the shadow of embarrassment fell behind him and he was in no mood to face it; his sight remained fixed firmly ahead, watching the water gush out before him, run over his battered hands, soak his sleeves. The water was sloshing about mid-thigh when Poe stripped off his shirt. It was a pain, soaked and sticking, tags catching, but when he finally got it off he slung it off to the side, the wet slap surprising a gasp out of one of the female statues.

His grin faded as he shuffled closer on his knees to the side of the bathtub, elbow hooked over the side so the water could stream over his side. Hissed as it hit the sore spot over his ribs, but it was a hiss of pleasurable agony, the spot quickly numbed so he had to switch sides. Did it the lazy way, practically rolling against the tub, knocking his knee and splashing, creeping up his body.

Did he want the water in him more than he wanted it on him? As he alternated between cupping handfuls of sweet water and letting it pour down the front of his body, Poe decided it was too close to call. It tasted too good, _felt_ too good—the air chilly on his bare wet chest, waves sloshing against his waist, the sound of his enthusiastic slurping. All of it hit him hard and fast, dropped his head to pillow on his dirt-streaked arm and fight to catch his breath.

Cold though the water was, it did nothing to dampen whatever drug it was that made his blood speed through his system. It amplified it, made the thirst worse even as he gave up on breathing to gulp down more water, knees spread to keep him balanced and hands flexing against the tiled floor.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Poe jerked away as something brushed the back of his hand, only caught himself at the last minute by grabbing at the rim of the tub. Up and on his feet in an instant, stumbling backwards with sloshes that echoed in the wide room. A blur of colour directly before him, a person, but there was something in his eyes that made them sting, tear up, and he wiped both hands over his face, slicked his hair back out of his eyes for good measure.

The woman from earlier. His new owner, he corrected himself wryly, but without real bitterness. He couldn't feel any towards the person responsible for putting him in the same room as all this fantastic water.

The abject horror in her face was amusing, but he was more interested in looking at the woman's bare feet than he was in seeing where the slave took his soggy pile of shirt after she snapped her fingers.

"Well?"

Small, delicate—she had the cleanest feet he'd seen… ever, really. In his memory. And the way they fed into slim ankles, one of those belled anklets that had caught his attention hooked over the bone. Travelled up to curving calves, the outline of legs visible even through the vibrant robe she wore. Purple again, she was seriously in love with the colour, but it was a flimsy thing, hardly there despite the loud clusters of red and gold flowers, printed haphazardly over the fabric. They couldn't distract from how it dipped over her shoulder on one side, revealing a stretch of naked skin that made something like hunger punch him hard in the gut.

Poe licked his lip, tasted candy as he carefully hitched up his pants, sodden and hanging dangerously low on his hips. Sucked in a shallow breath as they dragged against his half-hard cock. Whatever they'd given him- That taste in his mouth, cloying, set his head spinning. Like her smell; he'd waded back towards the rim of the tub, nearer to her without thinking about why. Too thirsty, or hungry, or _whatever_ to string a real thought together.

"I was thirsty," he said with a cheeky smile.

 

* * *

 

  
"Why didn't any of you get him something to drink?" Lila glared around the room in time to see a couple of the servants trade looks, which just irritated her further. "Am I speaking Huttese all of a sudden? An answer, please."

More glances, past her this time; she was prepared for the servant who stepped up behind her. "With respect, lady, Balla instructed us that you preferred to be the one to look after him. We were told-"

Lila made a noise of disgust and pressed her thumb between her eyebrows. Wrinkles. She was too old for this kind of stress. "Yes, yes, I know what I said." Something about bubbles, clothing… Really, it was all a bit of a blur. She'd just gotten home, had been busy taking her hair down, handing the pins to Balla as usual, and-

_Don't bother with him, I'll handle things myself._

Balla had made a face – shocked, a bit disapproving, and thoroughly out of order for someone in her position – that Lila had simply ignored, more interested in getting her own dirty clothes off. That would be the last time she was so vague in her directions.

There was a splashing noise before her; she lowered her hand, the threat of wrinkles vanishing at the sight of her slave wading towards her, a smirk on his wet face. The rest of Poe was wet as well, droplets trailing down his naked arms, chest, and- He was stockier than she'd initially realized. Much… stockier.

And much dirtier. He'd been wearing clothes when she bought him, and yet…? Her frown grew once more at the sight of fresh blood running thinly down his face on both sides, the yellow-green smears from the delouser. And that water swirling around him! Like something out of a sewer. How could he stand to be in it, let alone- Once more, Lila's calm disappeared in the face of such uncivilized behaviour.

"What is _wrong_ with you? It's bathtub water!" The wide sleeves of her silk robe dropped down her forearms to her elbows as she waved her hands in exasperation. "Are you stupid? It's not for _drinking_."

Poe shrugged. "Water's water, isn't it?"

"How are you still alive if you're so-" Lila covered her eyes. "I knew this would happen," she muttered. She crouched down in a practiced motion, knees tucked tight together like a proper lady, and grabbed him tightly by the chin. "No. Drinking. Dirty. Water." Loud and clear, punctuated every word with a small shake of his head that visibly rattled him.

Typical of him, he jerked out of her grip but didn't move away. Instead, eyes dark, he gazed steadily up at her, touched the spot where her neatly filed nails had left crescent marks in his skin.

"Well, if the service had been better I wouldn't have been left to serve myself." His tongue poked into his cheek where her thumb had pressed against a sore spot on his jaw.

"You drink when I say you do," Lila said absently, but she couldn't really fault him. Was it even filtered? Thirsty animals weren't the swiftest thinkers, and who knew when he'd last had anything to drink. Maybe he was damaged from the lack of hydration. Mentally. That would be great, it would go with the other obvious damage like the skin peeling on his burnt nose and his lips that were badly in need of some lip balm. Not to mention the sharp edge of hunger to the way he tracked the motion of her fingers wiping absently against her robe. It had fallen away from her leg during her crouch, enough to reveal a stretch of her thigh, and he swallowed thickly.

"What's done is done," she pronounced, unfolding back to her feet and looking down at him. "Just remember for the future: not for-"

"Drinking, yeah, whatever," he said with a heavy sigh that reminded her of her old nanny.

Swinging the long end of her belt as she strolled around the edge of the tub, conscious of Poe's unwavering attention.

"Bring him something proper to drink," she said, stepping on the control tile. The blue holo menu lit up immediately; a flick of her fingers stopped the water pouring in. A downward tug; a corresponding shushing sound from the pipes. Before her, Poe took a stumbling step back, alarmed as the water began to drain away. "Ideally _before_ the water's all gone and he freaks out." Couldn't believe she had to tack that on, but given how everyone had behaved in the last little while she thought it was sadly necessary.

Judging by how his face scrunched up in disgust, Poe was not concerned about wrinkles. "I'm not going to freak-"

"Shush." Lila couldn't remember the last time she'd set foot in this room. The walls were pretty, with a subtle mural of white blossoming trees against a turquoise backdrop, and the tiles were warm enough against her feet even if the tech was so outdated that she had to use gestures from two or three updates ago to browse the holomenu. There were still an acceptable number of options available for a thorough clean, but Lila found herself distracted in short order.

The water level was dropping steadily, creeping down her slave's body and revealing that, as usual, Lila had good instincts when it came to the impulse purchases Claudia so reviled. Sure, he wasn't in the best state—those contusions had better have lowered his price—but there was potential there in those defined muscles, the dark hair covering his body, the way his water-logged pants cleaved to strong thighs and left just enough to the imagination to make her consider, just for a moment, if he really needed a wash before she-

"Like something you see?" he asked before wiping at his bloody bottom lip with the back of his hand and smeared it on his pants.

Disgusting. Utterly unappealing.

"Just hoping they gave me a discount," she said, returning to the menu, deciding on water temperature. "Although they did warn me about your manners."

"You knew that when you bought me," he said, eyebrow cocked. If he was uncomfortable standing in the middle of the empty tub, half-naked and dripping and visibly aroused, he didn't look it. How much of that was the drugs or just his natural cocky personality was impossible to tell; he did so insist on staring at her, but he'd done that before they'd dosed him. Only once did he look away: when a servant appeared at the door, carrying a tray with a pitcher of water and a glass. He swallowed.

"Took long enough," Lila said as another servant stepped forward to fill the glass from the pitcher. She moved forward to take it from him and turned to the tub. "Now, are you capable of being polite?"

Eyes on the glass, he sauntered slowly forward until he was directly before her, fingers curling over the rim of the bathtub. "Depends. Is that for me?"

"That's not what I mean by polite," she said, tilting the glass slightly so the water sloshed slowly from side to side. "Ask nicely."

Instead, Poe covered her foot with his hand. "May I have a drink of water?"

Lila thought about chiding him for touching her without permission—and with his unwashed hand!—but he slid it up over her skin, wrapped his calloused fingers around her ankle and squeezed lightly. "Ask _nicely_ ," she said again.

He licked his lip; one of his fingers brushed back and forth over her ankle bone, rough skin making her shiver. "May I have a drink of water _please_?"

"Was that so hard?" She leaned down and held the glass out to him, pulling back when he reached for it. "Uh uh."

Whatever protest he was about to make vanished; he could be taught, Lila thought happily, lowering the glass again for him to drink from. The flush in his cheeks spread downwards quickly as he drank, but he forgot himself after the first swallow. He made a throaty sound, something like a grunt of satisfaction, before his eyelids slid shut and he drained the glass in short order.

"More?" Lila was already holding the glass out behind her for a servant to refill.

Poe's eyes were a little wild as they darted from her face to the glass, and he nodded hastily. "Yeah. Yes. Please." He hadn't let go of her ankle. In fact, his hand had tightened, as if he was afraid she'd leave, relaxing only when she offered him the refilled glass.

"That's enough," she said after the third glass. "Don't want you making yourself sick now, do we?" It was true that she had no idea how much he drunk before she'd arrived, but that wasn’t a real source of concern for her. He'd grown more flushed, breathing shallower with every long swallow. It might've been a few years but Lila recognized a candy-induced binge when she saw one coming, and she didn't want to waste it on something as inane as water.

There was naked hunger in Poe's face as he watched the servant leave with the glass and half-empty pitcher, but his grip on her ankle grew slack enough that she could step away.

The holomenu was still open; Lila made her final selections with some satisfaction. At once the water began to pour out once more from the sides, either the heat or the sudden appearance startling him.

"Don't drink it this time," Lila said in a chiding tone of voice that could've come straight from her father. "It won't agree with you."

"I'll try my best," he said drily, watching the water creep up. It was steaming, vaguely green in colour and strongly green in smell. Like new leaves uncurling from buds after a spring rain. Fresh, untouched, with a hint of sweetness under it, promising flowers. The strongest all-purpose cleanser she'd found in the system short of _laugo_ , and he wasn't dirty enough to merit having his skin peeled off.

"Do more than try." There was a white foam gathering on the surface, glimmering with dark blue sparkles; she crouched down next to the tub and stretched, barely skimming her fingers through it. She did love bubbles. Flicked it off her fingers before she pointed at Poe. "Now take off your pants."

He paused, then had the nerve to flutter his eyelashes at her. "Normally I like to know a woman's name before-"

"If you can't take them off yourself someone will do it for you." She made sure to say it slowly so he'd understand. His attitude was cute – it was almost entirely the reason she'd bought him—but she didn't really want to be here all day.

Again with the darting eyes; he must have been looking at the servants when he should've been looking at her. It's not like they mattered.

"No clothes in the bath," Lila explained, since he obviously needed things stated in the simplest terms.

The water had reached the top of his thighs when he hooked his thumbs in the low waist of his pants. His clumsy hopping as he fought with the water and gravity to get them off was endearing, but Lila regretted her choice. Too much foam; it obscured her view.

Oh well, she'd find out soon enough.

He waded forward to drop the dripping pants on the floor by her feet with a wet slap of noise, shoulders back and chin up. "Happy?"

"Ecstatic. So glad you're not as stubborn as I thought." How did they normally do this? Start at the top? Lila waited for a servant to clear away the laundry before she loosened the belt of her robe and sat down crosslegged by the edge of the tub. "Now come here. Your hair needs a wash."

"Is there any point to telling you I can do it myself?" Whether he'd realized it or not, he'd reached for her again, fingers brushing the undersides of her knees. That skin-hunger, the urge to touch—she remembered that from her own experiences with candy.

"Sure you can." Lila pushed his shoulder; he turned with a sigh. Was that the sort he was, the wistful sighing type? She hoped not. She really should've read his file or asked for a personality summary before she bought him.

But he settled down on the seat before her, water lapping up against the rim of the tub and threatening to soak her robe, and she thought maybe it had been for the best that she hadn't known anything about him. The source of the sweet smell was him, of course, completely at odds with his appearance. There were freckles scattered over the back of his well-tanned shoulders; she might have missed out if she'd let the toydarian convince her to look elsewhere.

"Is this your first time or what? Do I need to explain the basics?" he asked when she didn't move. Had the nerve to laugh weakly when she slapped the side of his head. "I thought so."

"Be quiet," she snapped, blushing as she scooped up a handful of foam and dolloped it on his head. A wonderfully dense lather built up instantly, obscuring her hands. "This isn't so hard," she said to herself. Why had she been letting servants do it all these years?

"Ha, so I _am_ -" he gasped when she tugged his hair accidentally on purpose. His head tipped forward; she worked her fingers into his surprisingly thick hair, feeling grit between the silky strands. There was a distinct brown tinge to the bubbles now that hadn't been there before. It was unnerving.

She squeezed his shoulder, high up by his neck. "Rinse."

For once he obeyed instantly, leaning forward to duck his head under the water while she bent forward enough to stick her soapy hands in the water to the side of him. Too far forward—when he straightened up, shook some of the excess water out of his hair, an arc of it streamed off and caught her in the face.

Someone in the room snickered, and if she ever found out who that person was she'd have them flogged. Flogging wasn't a thing she did but she'd bring it back just for them.

Perhaps sensing danger behind him, Poe remained firmly facing forward. There was a defined line on the back of his neck, roughly even with that thin metal necklace they'd left him—everything above, clean. Everything below, dirty. She'd done that.

It did nothing to cool her temper. The day—the whole long, frustrating day—had gotten the better of her. Nobody to spend any time with her, and after resorting to _buying_ some company he was proving to be trial. This was not how she'd meant to spend her birthday, dealing with one thing after another. And now her sleeves were damp, and she _hated_ wet sleeves.

Lila shrugged her robe off and shuffled nearer to the edge of the bathtub and shifted her legs, sat with them hanging into the water, bracketing her slave when she tugged at his necklace to pull him backwards. Closer. Easier to reach.

Poe huffed, but when his upper arms pressed against her inner thighs a flush ran through his body. Visible when his ears, the back of his neck turned a darker pink when she walked her fingers up his back, between his shoulder blades. Slid her hand up over the nob of his spine, under the chain, and he let out another of those breathy sighs. Like her sister swooning over her new hubby. Irritating.

The noise he made after she took hold of the chain and yanked on it was not so delicate.


End file.
